At least once every year I make it a point in my life to go over Such, Such is the Life, a collection of essays by George Orwell. It is a sort of literary pilgrimage, a spiritual destination that I can return to and feel grounded in meaning against the post-modern maelstrom of everyday life.

As a collection, Such Such is the Life is a broad cross-section of Orwell’s working the titled where the author reflects on the hardships of his school with ruddy Dickensian detail. The secret is to read it as fast as possible so that you can catch the trains of thought that run throughout the collection. Each new reading usually gives me a new train. This time I noticed his treatment of animals.

One of Orwell’s famous essays included in Such, Such is the Life, is On Killing an Elephant. It is a story from his time as a policeman in colonial Burma, in which an elephant experiencing an attack of...

A few months ago we read The Trauma Cleaner by Sarah Krasnostein in our book club. So when I found out Sandra Pankhurst was talking at Preston Library I booked tickets right away. I went and saw her speak last night.

The Trauma Cleaner is the account of the life of Sandra Pankhurst. Today, Sandra is an accomplished owner of a small successful business that performs trauma cleaning - the sometimes gruesome, sometimes tragic, always putrid task of cleaning up after deaths and in the houses of chronic hoarders.

This is worth a book in itself but the second thread of The Trauma Cleaner is about Sandra’s extraordinary journey as a transgender woman. Sandra was born a man and grew up in 50s Footscray. Her childhood was horrific, suffering acute physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her mother and father. In short: Sandra escapes, gets a job, gets married, has two children, but...

“Most people I know who came to Melbourne are emotional refugees,” my mate said last Friday night. We had visited the German Tivoli Club for the same reason most people did, in the hope of finding something like we knew back home. In Sydney that is, not Germany. There we had regularly dined on the giant schnitzels and pork knuckles at Tempe’s Conchordia club. We visited lots of ethnic clubs. They are a good way to pop your bubble and interact with the city’s ethnic groups on their own terms and turf. During the Rio world cup we even did a tour, visiting any club of a national team that was playing. Who knew there was a Uruguay club in Hinchinbrook? We did. They welcomed us with open arms.

The Tivoli proved a disappointment. The food was good and in the restaurant an old man in a Tirolean cap played the harpsichord. But management had opened another bar. We did not make it to the...

I found out about Letterkenny from one of the many facebook/reddit Always Sunny in Philadelphia pages I lurk on. Someone asked if anyone else had ever considered a cross-over episode between the shows. I took this to mean they were very similar and their worlds and styles would mesh easily. After bingeing 5 seasons I realise such an undertaking would be impossible to achieve and dangerous to try. Still I came away with a new show - Letterkenny.

Letterkenny is about the town tiny town of the same name, population 5000. It follows different crews and solo characters as they interact with one another - sometimes motivated on a quest, sometimes just pitching jokes from the sidelines. The main characters are the hicks - a group of three fast-talking, stern and biscuits-and-gravy home cooked countryfolk and the sexually promiscuous sister of one, Katy (Michelle Mylett).

The action of...

This week Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced Liberal’s plan for Australia’s future population. The announcement came with Morrison and Alan Tudge, Minister for Cities, Urban Infrastructure and Population, fronting up to the cameras with a plan to reduce Australia’s immigration intake by 30,000 from 186,000 in 2018 - 2019 to 160,000.

Before Trudge, armed with a powerpoint presentation, trudged through the stats, Morrison said that this reduction would ease congestion in the major cities. The image conjured up was of every immigrant stepping onto the tarmac and straight into a hire car to just drive around in circles getting in everybody’s way. When streamed on Facebook the comments were a suitably apoplectic accompaniment to the stream of angry faces: “What about infrastructure?” “Not one mention of climate change”. Over to Trudge who confirmed with graphs and all that, while...

It’s a clever formula that the Netflix Dramedy Easy does. Get regular looking people in remarkable but relatable situations, write all the dialogue in a mumblecore script, place them in hip Chicago and there you have it: Easy. Perhaps the initial title for the story had been Accessible. It’s cool because its so understated. Mumblecore provides an air of authenticity - in that actors aren’t dropping big lines for dramatic effect and the characters often misunderstand each other - just like real life.

Only it isn’t.

The place where Easy falls is that everything is played so safely. The character’s lives are generally good - the hurdles put in their way are usually an easy hop - usually some small humiliation or a complexity in a relationship. A woman is pregnant and doesn’t want to tell her boyfriend, a husband and wife try opening up their marriage.

In perhaps the most memorable...

Tomorrow I will be heading to Kiribati (pronounced: KEEREEBUS). This is a atoll nation with a population of 110,000 i-Kiribati (natives) drifting in the pacific ocean, in the most advanced timezone in the world and very very far from anywhere. It’s nearest neighbour that most people will have heard of is Samoa which is 19 hours by plane.

A co-worker of mine said that at night you can stand on the beach under a sky full of stars and feel like you’re at the edge of the world.

The primary purpose of my trip is to gain access to their health system’s computer. This is not as nefarious as it sounds. The data inside is aggregated and anonymised - that is, privacy is not an issue - and we’re only enabling them to view their data through our visualisation and reporting software.

A secondary purpose will be to observe and interview citizens of a nation whose lands will, in the near future, no...

In 2018 three things happened in the Climate Change movement. Firstly, the PR battle over climate science was won. As of 2019 it is impossible for a climate sceptic to operate publicly with any credibility and those who deny are left to lurk in dark corners of social media. Even troll overlord President Trump had to leave Paris under the crude facade of striking a better deal rather than questioning the science itself. This victory corresponded to mass divesting from fossil fuels - the big four banks refusing to fund Adani, for example. Big money showed up to a climate conference for the first time at Katowice, Poland. It felt like things were beginning to tip.

Thanks to the breathing room offered by this momentary victory, in 2018 the climate movement also had time to take a glance in the review mirror and deliberate on its own history. To much fanfare The New York Times released...

I can remember the feeling of holding my book for the first time fresh from the printer. Fanning through the pages the smell of ink and paper bleach. Half a decade of striving, of fate left in the capricious hands of editors, publishers and publishing houses, was now over. Here, right here, in my hands was something that justified sacrificing career progression, time, enough cash for a house deposit, even a relationship.

The worst thing that could happen now would be that one day I would pass Bargain Basement Bookshop in the central station tunnel, on my way to work and see my book there in a stack of identical siblings - a pink flouro sticker that would leave traces of white that would turn to mouldy black over time - $34 down to $3. That I could handle.

I wasn’t going to have a launch party. It seemed self-indulgent. But friends coaxed me into it. You have achieved something - you...

It has been over a decade since The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 was published by Lawrence Wright. Back in 2006 George W Bush was still president, ISIS had not arrived in earnest and the civil war in Syria was still 5 years away. Then the aftershock from September 11 was still being felt, with the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq drawing international ire and a USA was still struggling to work out exactly what it meant domestically. Perhaps they still are.

As a study on September 11, The Looming Tower is unparalleled, reverse engineering the birth of modern Islamic fundamentalism through a mosaic of historical personal histories. It’s an effective method, as looking at the ideas themselves would have marooned Wright in a quagmire of lengthy theoretical discursions and the individuals are far too compelling for that.

Wright’s timeline noteworthy too - beginning...