#MeToo. Marriage equality. The Royal Commission into responses to child sexual abuse. Domestic violence. Today, the politics of private experience takes up a lot of space in public debate. There’s good reason for this: these issues resonate because they impact so many of us. Public discussion of these issues ...
Naming a book may seem more difficult than writing it. My first stab at a title for this memoir wasGlass Negatives. I chose this because my father used glass negatives in a large ancient camera to photograph weekend picnickers he took up the Lane Cove River in a launch he ...
From the blue depths of the ocean to the twinkling vastness of black space; from the pulsing red cells of the human heart to the biological behemoth of the Great Barrier Reef; from the nanorobot to the Large Hadron Collider ... science is everywhere.
Let me get one thing straight. This new book of mine,The Getting of Garlic: Australian food from bland to brilliant, with recipes old and new, is not just about garlic, although it does play a pivotal part in the story. But we’ll get to that.
Neil Armstrong once said that although science fiction writers like Jules Verne and HG Wells had found ways to get people to the Moon, they had never imagined lunar explorers talking to their controllers back on Earth. ‘The authors foresaw my part of the adventure’, Armstrong told a gathering of ...
There is a war being waged for the future of Australia.
Seventeen years after A Certain Style was first published, Jacqueline Kent’s biography of Australia’s first full-time book editor Beatrice Davis is being reissued for a new generation of publishing aficionados. Kent spoke with former UQP nonfiction publisher Alexandra Payne about what’s changed in the editing profession since ...
When we began to fall in love, he was still living with his wife. The process was so gradual it was almost imperceptible, like watching ice melt. I didn’t have much time to contemplate what was unfolding between us: my father was sleeping in my bed every night, while ...
1One of the very first questions you are asked when a psychiatrist is fumbling towards a ‘bipolar’ diagnosis relates to family history. This is a nod towards the genetic, hereditary nature of the disease, but also a narrative framing device. Who? When? What? How? Why? The line is traceable. And ...
