Essays

I write in my journal the list of jobs for the week. Then I read from Mary Oliver’s Poetry Handbook: ‘The most important point in the line is the end of the line. The second most important point is the beginning of it.’I make a note.

Physical rest is emotional, whether you want it to be or not. Slowing down physically means the insides follow sometime after, though they cannot be rushed.

Awoken by his insomnia after a performance by Grinderman in 2011, Nick ends up sending me an email that wrestles with his complicated sense of who his father was.

The Daintree blockade had lasted about eight months all up, and here I was into my eighth year of writing about the damn thing.

What came first: the projection of women’s qualities (wiliness, treachery, dependency) onto translation, or the projection of translation’s qualities (submissiveness, restraint, inferiority) onto women?

My skin is white, or rather it is a soft, warm pink, which is the colour of the skin of the most dangerous and successful pillagers in recent times. I descend from them. I am them. Nothing is random. I am capable of killing another person but I would prefer not to. I would prefer not to survive an apocalypse.

Tracker is a blueprint for building an independent Aboriginal-controlled university, one that is tied to land, culture and people.

I am not certain that Elizabeth von Arnim remembered her Australian beginnings but neither am I convinced that she had forgotten them altogether.

We didn’t see each other for a couple of months and I thought good riddance you bloody dickhead. Then, one afternoon I ran into a mutual friend who told me that Mike was in hospital, very ill, with aids.

It wasn’t surprising for the Prime Minister to say what he did to me the one time we met in person at the Sydney Olympics in late September 2000.