At the time of writing this the penny has not quite dropped for a lot of Australians on the broad implications COVID 19. Still we congregate in parks and beaches in a manner that is less about noble defiance and more about wilful ignorance. The disease threatening the world is, to many of us, a story that happens on the tele at night from which we are firmly insulated by a sheet of glass as thick as our skulls.

The belief underpinning it all is Australian exceptionalism - that we on our massive continent, exist on a scale and remoteness that renders us immune to it all. It follows our anxiety with refugees - that somebody, no matter how pathetic, may breach our island fortress unravels this assumption. It represents the world and all its problems coming to knock and we don’t like it one little bit. Hence the overamped macho style response: Operation Sovereign Borders.

So too our...

I just finished Ishmael by Daniel Quinn and just wanted to excavate the main philosophical line of reasoning here to refer to later.

The Premise

The book is about an unnamed writer that spent his life searching for greater meaning. When he sees an ad in the paper:

“TEACHER seeks pupil. Must have earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person.”

When the writer answers the ad by visiting a small office he find that the teacher is actually a gorilla named Ishmael who can inject thoughts into the writer’s mind. What follows from this absurd premise is a philosophical dialogue between teacher and pupil in the oldest sense of the tradition. This is the meat of Ishmael - I want to recount it here.

The Philosophy Condescend

Humankind is separated into two distinct historical strains - the Takers and the Leavers. The Takers originated from the Fertile Crescent at the dawn of...

It’s not often that the world demands a journalist to write a book. Usually the journalist, book in mind, has to scream in the hope the world might listen. It is refreshing then to find the fit between author and book so perfect to bring about the former.

Marsha Gessen, was contacted by her best friend who told her on no uncertain terms she must write a book about the Tsarnaev brothers - the terrorists responsible for the 2012 bombings at the Boston Marathon. That friend should be rewarded with a nice bottle of something for that bolt of inspiration - for the end result The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy is about as good a match between author’s lived experience and subject matter as exists.

Gessen is ideal because she has stood astride of the three worlds concerned - she was born in the Soviet Union, schooled in America and then emigrated again to Russia (as distinct from...

It was over a lunchtime conversation at Los Alamos in 1950 between physicists discussing the likelihood of intelligent life up there in the vaulting desert sky. The debate shifted back and forth across the table, moving between the probability that a planet that could support intelligent life, the number of such planets within our galaxy, and the possibility of moving between galaxies.

Eventually this conversation moved on to some other piece of scientific small-talk - whether or not up there teemed with alien life was filed away for another day. But then quite out of the blue Italian physicist Enrico Fermi who had been quietly mulling over something asked his famous question “Well where is everybody?” So was born the paradox that bears his name.

Embedded within Fermi’s remark are some profound implications. If earth-like planets are relatively common and civilisations expand then...

By 2020 the environmentalist movement has become fully corporate. He has finally found a three-piece suit that fits and now comfortably glides through the innards of glass-clad CBD towers or waits calmly by the filter coffee and danishes of annual general assemblies, business card poised - ready to network. He has been doing business now for some time - green credentials and sustainability are his stock and trade. He is more Bezos than Greta.

This sentiment of Paul Kingsnorth echoes throughout his collection of essays Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist. This conversion of environmentalist from hessian clad wookie to well oiled spiv came about once the movement stopped making a purely ethical appeal and made its case economic. It demanded a linguistic pivot where data supplanted poetry.

Beneath the language lurked a change in underlying assumptions. Where once environmentalism...

Stare into the churning clouds
of a climate rendered hostile
a draught of smoke
stabs the back of your throat
as daily the sun looms closer
not rose coloured glasses but a red lens

To recall summers
when heat was life
kiyuku grass glossy as an unpacked toy
the buzz of cicadas
a sprinkler without guilt
we are richer today for the bargain

Now head out of the city into a landscape
warped and angry
demanding a response
but we emote on a short cycle
insanity monetized
a people - headless, blind and furious

My three sisters all have babies
Ears yet untuned to the mounting roar
Skin soft as talc
What will they know of summer
Now the barbarians are firmly past the gates
Taken residence in the highest seats.

Much of my 36 years has been a search for the right words. Over that time what I need from those words has changed. Broadly it has oscillated between objectivity and music, between a flint-hard tool and a musical instrument.

As a child I needed them to convey information about the world as I discovered it. The magic lay in that discovery and needed no ancillary, lyrical function besides. Later in my teens when I became a twitching bundle of raw emotion I needed words to soothe as music - to deliver and articulate emotion - and make me feel less alone. Again in my late twenties as I embarked on a career I demanded words be objective, to yield absolute meaning to serve as scaffolding to my ideas. I can feel over the past few months my appetite for music again growing. I have many people to thank for this. David Whyte is one of them.

I came across Whyte in a conversation between him and...

As I have said before I began my journey with Eckhart Tolle a sceptic. I was advised to read him by my therapist. His teachings are clad in Californian, self-help, New Age garb. I mean this literally - when Tolle is often photographed it’s usually dressed in pale beige linen - but also figuratively - he has been promoted by Oprah; his books have titles like A New Earth: Awaken You Life’s Purpose and The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment; their covers have backgrounds of photoshop gradients transitioning to two colours that don’t quite complement each other - an aesthetic that smacks of small run, spiritual publishing houses. It all seemed very suspect.

If Tolle had heard my attitude, he would say this prejudice was an intrusion of my ego, its toxic demand to have an opinion without the openness and presence to accept teachings as they arrived in the moment. If I had...

Starting from Less than Zero

I had been meditating on and off for years before I received a subscription Sam Harris’ Waking Up meditation app. Up to this point my intermittent practice was frustrating and unsatisfying - a concession to mental wellness turned into yet another box to be ticked off during my day. I would sit there in my home office - eyes closed and spend the time day dreaming. It wasn’t real meditation. When a bell sounded to progress to the next stage of mindfulness (the twenty minute meditation had 4 stages) I realised I had wasted the time lost in my thoughts. I would get more frustrated making me tense up more and think increasingly frenzied thoughts thus getting even more frustrated. It was a feedback loop that left me more tense than when I began.

I had an instinctive prejudice against meditation apps. They seemed like yet another example of unnecessary...

Last week both Melbourne and Sydney had a deluge of rain that cleared the major city’s skies of bushfire haze. No longer will the bushfires be right there in everybody’s face. What happens now will be a test of Australian’s ability to remember and translate smouldering anger into political action.

At last count the fires have claimed 25.5 million acres, at least 28 human lives, a billion animals and 2000 homes. And still they burn.

Australian’s have felt the centre of the world’s attention which has revealed our national leaders as inept, lazy, callous - a sad joke that landed flat garnering nothing but cynical smirks from those in the know.

There is plenty here to make a cynic’s case, although none of it new. Last year before the federal election, I had on the radio show journalist Michael West who had just released the documentary Dirty Power. Shot with Greenpeace’s Investigative...