Intergenerational trust and betrayal

MORE THAN SEVEN hundred years ago a young poet commenced a journey that would define the human condition. Dante’s The Divine Comedy continues to resonate – arguably with new urgency in what many feel are dark times. His journey through hell commenced on the...

Waiting our turn

GENERATIONALISM IS A complex phenomenon. The concept of a generation is obvious: the social and economic contexts for a group of people born around the same time are going to be somewhat similar. But in addressing lived experience, a number of factors highlight how arbitrary...

Your sons, your daughters

WEARY WORKING WARRIORS of Australia, we need to talk about what your heroic long hours, your selfless overtime, and your lack of self-care is doing to our nation’s mental health. I’m looking at anyone who associates the word ‘millennial’ with young people who seem...

A consensus for care

I USED PENCIL to write the due date for my baby in my diary. It was one of those pocket business diaries, with times recorded at hourly intervals. On the page for 5 April I wrote ‘baby!’ in semi-large letters across a few of...

Who owns the future?

THE FUTURE IS always arriving, in one form or another. There is no no future. It’s an absurdly simple point, like saying that one plus one equals two. But despite its apparent simplicity, it bears remembering because its corollary has far-reaching consequences: that the...

A gonzo music memoir

SO YOU GET an urge. Something bristling within you that can only get out through something else. Maybe it was because you didn’t fit in; maybe it was because you fitted in too well. You’ve heard stories of that uncle from up north who practised...

Unpaid opportunities

I HAVE THIS social dread when meeting new people. A nervousness that keeps me on edge during the early introductions and the vocal sparring that takes place after shaking hands and saying each other’s names. It’s not an aversion to interacting with strangers; I’m...

Economic illiterates

THE YEAR I was born, Paul Keating dropped Australia’s corporate tax rate by ten percentage points. As I started primary school, it dropped six more. When John Howard received his ‘mandate for the GST’, I was busy calling my friends on three-way chat. That...

The sickness of social organisation

TAKE A LOOK in your medicine cabinet; these days, it’s where wellness lives. No longer satisfied with treating illness when it occurs, we strive for something more. Every part of our body, inside and out, has a ‘natural’ product aimed at improving it. We...

Young lady, that’s inappropriate

AFTER GRADUATING FROM law school, I spent a full and disturbing year working as a judge’s associate in the District Court of Queensland. The role required silence and discretion, and each week I sat, mute and powerless, watching things unfurl in front of me –...

Measuring imperfection

IN RETROSPECT, IT was always a stupid idea to buy a Fitbit; I’m still not entirely sure why I did it. Some of my friends – actually, a lot of my friends – were wearing them, and I’d watched the way they locked eyes and nodded,...

A little too close to the sun

When this essay was reprinted on The Guardian website on 6 July 2017, the writer added the short introduction below in order to give the piece context. We've reproduced it here in order to illustrate the extremity of her treatment during the first half...

Still talkin’ up to the white woman

THE NAKED WOMAN is only visible when my manager’s door is open – when closed it is unclear what the painting depicts. From my desk I can make out the faint outline of a woman’s back through the frosted glass wall that partitions her office...

Peasant dreaming

WHEN WE WERE kids, my sisters and I weren’t allowed to watch TV during dinner. The risk of seeing John Howard was too much for my parents to bear. In the months after he became prime minister, Mum and Dad wore their opposition proudly,...

Of monsters and men

ON A SATURDAY morning in March 2014, I found myself speaking in front of a crowd of five thousand people on the shore of Cottesloe Beach, Perth. We were there to protest a state government policy to catch and kill large sharks using baited...

Conversations with my sister

ON THE WAY home from Brisbane airport, my older sister Tammy turns to me from the driver’s seat and asks an unexpected question: ‘So, are you going to marry him?’ She says this in a silly voice while pulling a silly face – a mode...

The spectator

I WENT TO a high school filled with smart kids. Kids who had been specially selected because their brains were somehow advanced. But they were only smart in the way they could read books and do tricky things with numbers in their heads. Many...

Today is already yesterday

I WAS BORN in 1983, the same year as Microsoft Word. It was also the year the first mobile phones went on sale in the US, and Apple introduced its graphical user interface computer, the Lisa. Not quite a decade later, my parents lugged...

A cry from the heart

I’M THE GENERATION that could spell the end of nature. I’m the generation that could farewell real-life connections. I’m the generation that is facing the biggest inequality the world has seen: sixty-two people hold half the world’s wealth. I’m the generation that has been swallowed by the...

Revering the other

EACH DAY AT sunset I sit on my fourth-storey balcony in Oman and look out over the pastel-pink town, waiting for the pigeons. They always come at the same time, a huge flock of them weaving deftly through the sky, each brisk turn harmonious,...

The bystander

No matter how you twist it, life stays frozen in the headlights John Ashbery     THERE WERE SEVEN of us. Five in the car, two in the boot. We were driving to a party no one knew for sure was happening. This is how our nights played out....

Under the skin

Everyone forgets that the real force behind the feminist movement was individual women’s disappointment with men. Even though equal pay for equal work and reproductive rights soon took centre stage, the rage that had welled up began in male–female relationships. bell hooks, Communion: The Female...

To my future child

TO MY FUTURE child: Your grandmother’s mother, my wai-po, is a pack rat. I parked in her garage twice a week during the semester I studied at your grandmother’s alma mater, the University of Sydney, and it’s a high-agility parking job, because what should fit...

Worlds beyond

THE BLUE WHALE is only a metre or two away from me, and its huge right eyeball is level with mine. I have never seen the largest creature on Earth from this angle, at this depth, in these dimensions. Its body mass fills my...

Off the plan

IT’S EARLY 2017, and the first lists of the most unaffordable housing in the world have dropped. Oh boy. I’ve been waiting for this since the great smashed-avocado-versus-home-deposit showdown of 2016. It’s gratifying. There’s my current city, Melbourne, holding sixth place for third year running....

Young Saigon

IN THE BUILDING opposite mine here in Ho Chi Minh City, still commonly called Saigon, an old man in the top-floor apartment tends his rooftop garden. He climbs there via a ladder every morning, shirtless and holding a plastic watering can, and spends a...

A modern epic

I MEET THE immortals on a Wednesday evening in January. We’re upstairs on Russell Street, in a workspace shared by a couple of tech start-ups. Though it’s after 6 pm, most of the workstations are occupied with coders cocooned in Skullcandy headphones. The tap-tapping...

Caring for country

SMALL FIRES STREAK the savanna beneath me, as the land is worked and cleaned. The gentle smoke on the horizon is sign of a healthy country. In the distance, disappearing into a soft haze, lies the rugged stone country of the Arnhem Land Plateau....

The view from up here

SLIPPING OFF HER high heels, she sighs with relief – more out of habit than real affliction – and takes a step onto the fluffy expanse of carpet. The tendons in the back of her legs stretch. She pads into the pale, bright living room, taking...

Fossil Fuels

THE NIGHT BEFORE Jules went up to Townsville for his Nan’s eightieth, we cut each other’s hair. In all the time we’d been together, he’d always cut mine in the kitchen, and I didn’t see why I should fork out at the hairdresser just...

Ordinary things

I was out walking yesterday or perhaps it was todaywhen a man young as a son spoke under his breath: goback home, he said, you belong. There, not here. Beforenot now. This is not the first time, time was confused.Tomorrow I go for a...

Hey sweetheart, hey love

Iam a night-time walker, Iprefer dark, dark publicparks,the sound of the bush splittinga grin, baked earth beneath mywalker’s feet. A night-time walker, Iprefer outskirts around mywalker’s knees, the sound of the silken breeze. I, a night-time walker,am a conduit forremarks. I am a night-time walker.A matter-of-time walker....

Futurefear

Driverless Cars Transmogrify Ethics!Galahs spring-grapple from nest to road. AIs Writing Festive Songs!A puff and it is nothing – some down – Will Automation Take Your Job?– affixed on a rear-view screen. A silent car. Social Media Is Isolating Us!Huffing putrefied old carbon. Piston-punching rolls us on. White...

Standing Rock