On Saturday in Richmond, Victoria anti-lockdown protesters rushed police lines. Having had plans to march through the city’s centre dampened by the state government shutting down public transport they tried to march on foot. Hence the police barricade.

The crowd looked shambolic - a hodgepodge that you usually get at these things. Wearing ersatz protective gear of bicycle helmets, goggles and umbrellas, sporting Eureka stockade flags, Australian Federal flags and banners saying things like “Science has disgraced itself” or “Free our kids”. The numbers weren’t massive but were too significant to be dismissed.

Footage that spread throughout social channels showed police blocking a thoroughfare in a narrow gully, the photographer videotaping from above. A front-line of burly male protesters rushed and quickly broke through the police lines. A policeman was knocked over and trampled. A...

In Melbourne at least, this lockdown feels very different from the same time last year. Back then rainbows were chalked on the footpaths, messages hung in street facing windows that we could beat this thing. The general tone was of broad unity: we were all in this together. Trust and faith in the decision-makers was at an all time high. The state’s Premier Dan Andrews’ press conferences became moments of solidarity. Here was our elected leader and we were united against a common microbiological enemy.

This time things are very different. As COVID drags on into the second half of its second year morale is at an all time low. I’ll take a stab at why this is - and it certainly is not just a function of time, although that plays into it. First - COVID is clearly here to stay. The theory that we (Australia) as an island can expunge ourselves of the disease has been debunked. Of course it...

In Freedom, writer Sebastian Junger discusses the value of honesty within tribal society. He states that honesty was vital, firstly because it improved a group’s cohesiveness by developing mutual trust and secondly because the margin of survival was so thin and resources so scarce that the price of deceit often fatal. Junger points out the reason it was so easy for colonialists to deceive native inhabitants and take their land was they struggled to conceive of lying - so entrenched was honesty as a basic necessity for survival.

Today our margin of survival is much wider. The agricultural and medical revolutions mean that humans are far less vulnerable to disease and starvation than in any previous era. War has become so devastating between equal powers that it is made at great risk.

Conditions in which we are insulated from catastrophe naturally allow dishonesty to flourish. After...

NSW’s failure to contain COVID will now be the whole of Australia’s. It speak’s to both Scott Morrison and Gladys Berejiklian’s lack of any humility, accountability or responsibility. Here failure is being recast as success and NSW’s runaway state of COVID cases as all part of the plan. The way out of all this is vaccination not containment - the British model - get 80% of people vaccinated and screw the remaining 20% as COVID rips through the population.

The shame of it all is that it was so unnecessary. As late as mid-June we still had COVID cases nationwide in the single digits. The current outbreak triggered (as most of them are) by insufficient quarantine procedures, something that should be utterly foolproof reveal that the Australian people, our livelihoods and our economy are being lead by a government that for all its bombast is incompetent. As with the bushfires, both the NSW...

It was footage that shocked the world. At Hamid Kazai International Airport, desperate civilians grabbing onto the underside of the final US cargo plane. Some continued to hold on even as the Boeing C-17 took off. It is truly amazing they managed to retain their grip as the C-17 takes off at around 115 miles per hour or 185 kilometres per hour. The footage ends with the plane well into the air, turning back and flying over the airport, Afghans still tumbling through the air onto the baking tarmac.

I had tried to remember the last time I had seen human bodies in freefall and the grainy footage of American news - it had been the event that triggered this all off - September 11 - when those other humans had leapt from the burning World Trade Centre. There is grim symmetry at play here. Desperation makes ordinary humans pick one certain death over another. Immolation or torture on one hand...

At the moment I am moving house. This is especially difficult during COVID because public services and some businesses are run at a skeletal level and sometimes only open tradies or “for commercial reasons.” There is no corresponding relaxation of requirements when I leave my rental property. The garden must be tidy and having had a dog the carpets must be steam cleaned and the house fumigated.

Given the amount of green waste required after pruning the backyard far exceeds the green bin you have to take some to the tip. Inexplicably the tip is closed during this lockdown except for tradies. This means the process of disposing suddenly blows out from a hundred for a few hundred dollars. After an infuriating call with the local council, I was told my only option was to take the green waste to my new house. When I told them it was a unit and so did not have sufficient room to store the...

Gone but not forgotten, the departure of Christine Holgate as AusPost CEO keeps smouldering in the headlines but now threatens to vanish at last. That she was humiliated by the PM and bullied by the Australia Post Chairman Lucio di Bartolomeo is now a certainty. Whether $1 million in compensation plus $100,000 in court costs all funded by the the Commonwealth owned company is just compensation for the emotional distress of being “driven to despair” as her opening statement relays is a matter that has been decided by the courts.

In past months, the Coalition have been facing a steady reckoning at the hands of female voters. The PM’s approval rating is sliding, due in part to his party’s treatment of women. Such consequences are long overdue. That Christian Porter has been appointed Leader of the Lower House, after allegations of rape, has signaled to many that the LNP intend to weather...

This is an introduction to Crossing the Threshold a book that will most likely never be written

Threads of smoke are only distinguishable from cirrus clouds by their lower altitude. Inside, I can feel a throbbing hangover wrestling with the shambles of a McDonalds breakfast. Outside, the wide scrubby dirt plain relents at the Great Dividing Range that hovers at the horizon. This is summer on the Hume Highway and we have a long journey to Sydney. Two years of drought have turned the grass to straw and the wind picks up dust, tossing it from eddies before showering it back down.

I am with Giulia and our dog Chutney in Giulia’s black Mercedes. Chutney is an imperious Brussels Griffon - the breed that George Lucas modelled Star Wars’ Ewoks on. Giulia’s Mercedes historically has been a reliable car despite individual functions packing it in. The fuel gauge, for example, doesn’t work and...

The results are in. For nearly a year, campers, 4WD and caravans have been fetching hyper-inflated prices while those under or emerging from lockdown plan their next escape. No longer shackled to their desks, some have even made a lifestyle of working on the road. For the adventurous globetrotter attention is being turned inward to the innards of Australia. Trips to Bali have become roadtrips to Broken Hill. This has unleashed a bunch of new campers with their mint condition camping gear onto the country’s interior.

For me, I have just taken a two and a half week hiatus from work and writing - a trip in my 4WD to the Australian hinterlands of South Australia. The original plan was to take a few weeks to drive to Alice Springs and meet up with friends and slowly return to Adelaide via the Flinders ranges and Oodnadatta track with them.

After limited planning I headed off. Within a...

I just finished two short books by Sebastian Junger - Tribes: On Homecoming and Belonging and the just published Freedom. Both address similar themes - our modern life is awash with material wealth and technology that pervious epochs would consider us gods. Yet something essential is missing. Junger claims that our rampant pursuit of individuality has left us with without community. This state of being rich and alone is the source of our existential dread.

Junger taps into deep research and personal experience of living with native Americans and as an embedded journalist in the war in Afghanistan. In doing so Junger brings heft to his thesis that would otherwise have a neo-militaristic and masculinist tinge. This leads him to some deeply unfashionable conclusions - war for all it dehumanising hellishness has the redeeming quality that it provides connectedness for the soldiers that they...