New on the SRB:
Mel Campbellon thin skin Catriona Menzies-Pikeon blurb culture Megan Cheongon Edwina Preston Oliver Reesonon Alejandro Zambra Louis Kleeon poetry and work Mel Campbellon thin skin Catriona Menzies-Pikeon blurb culture Megan Cheongon Edwina Preston Oliver Reesonon Alejandro Zambra Louis Kleeon poetry and work
Good Mother, Bad Mother, Art Mother
Like many of the memoirs, essays and novels concerning motherhood that have been published in the last decade, Bad Art Mother reaches beyond the reductive ideals of good and bad mothering that have, I imagine, always plagued mothers.
A Kind of Truth
I started Chilean Poet just before Christmas while I was visiting my family in Brisbane and then I finished it during the first days of the new year, while I was ferociously coming down. It was life-affirming and glorious and gently wise and I loved it, needed it. It temporarily restored some sense of hope, like a synthetic serotonin.
The Commute
Essays about getting around.
Elias Greigon deferred arrivals Sophiya Sharmaon migration Eda Gunaydinon learning to drive Mykaela Saunderson life in the van Peter Doyleon life behind the wheel Elias Greigon deferred arrivals Sophiya Sharmaon migration Eda Gunaydinon learning to drive Mykaela Saunderson life in the van Peter Doyleon life behind the wheel
A Road Warrior
So I take it – with a caveat. I am not the Road Warrior – neither Mad Max himself, nor my mate from Caba. But I am a Road Warrior. It’s how I live and where I feel most like myself. On the road, alone, living by the sun and stars, with no waged labour or clocks in sight.

Passage
Before there were call centres, help desks, delivery bikes and Uber, before labour hire firms and all the rest started offering young people new ways of working long and hard for doubtful return, before the term ‘gig economy’ had come into being – before all that the one way to make a quick, modest dollar was to drive cabs on the night shift. It was a Sydney thing.
From the SRB archives:
Against Motherhood Memoirs
How to describe the current motherhood-memoir nexus? Owing to commercial pressures, nonfiction books by women writers dealing in any way with motherhood are unlikely to be sold as books of thinking, exploration, reportage, cultural critique or all the above. Instead they are dubbed motherhood memoirs. At the same time writing about mothering has become constrained, made predictable, by certain memoiristic tropes, vocabularies, intensities and scales. I don’t want to make any big declarations about how when you spit in a bookshop you hit a memoir, except to note it’s not only women, it’s brain surgeons, the children of spies, young writers with hybrid identities, survivors of trauma, each getting pushed down the memoir route by their publishers or agents or maybe by their own sense of what kind of books are possible and wanted.