Drought

A Guide to the Murray Darling Basin

Water Under the Bridge

By Kate Jennings

Settle down. I insulted the Greens on purpose to get your attention. Green-ish myself. Climate change? Happening. Melting poles, warming oceans. People, do something! But if I’d started by discussing tillage fractures or SER statistics, you would’ve drifted, flipped the page. I also wanted to make a point about insults. If you begin an op-ed piece, as Tim Flannery did in the Age, with “

East Timor’s Lost Generation

Postcolonial Blues

By Jill Jolliffe

Known as generation foun (‘the new generation’), Lemos’ contemporaries are remembered principally for staging the pro-independence demonstration at Santa Cruz cemetery in 1991, in the East Timor capital of Dili, which ended in a massacre by the Indonesian army. The movement in fact began in 1989 during a visit by Pope John Paul II when students held a demonstration and hit world headlin

Comment: The Queensland Floods

By Alex Miller

When I first arrived in the central Queensland town of Springsure on the train the previous year the roads were impassable and I was stuck in town and unable to get out to the station. I had no money but the hotel down by the railway – it is still there – took me in and gave me bed and board and a free run of the bar for more than a week before I could get a lift out to the station with the mailman. Some months later, when I was dro

Diaries

While Not Writing a Book

By Helen Garner

Early in the morning, after a heavy night of babysitting, I’m watering out the back when I hear a shuffling sound. Olive comes up behind me in her spotted dressing-gown and slippers, looking hunched and dramatic, and holding a sheet of paper in one hand. “Read this,” she says. Dear Nanny I feel really Embarrased about last night and Ted got all the Boo

How Not to Win the Melbourne Cup

By Anne Manne

Our racing story began when I purchased a quiet thoroughbred mare with a doleful expression for our daughters to ride. When her papers arrived they carried a surprise; sleepy old Letty had an illustrious racing pedigree. Sired by a champion European miler, she

Beating the Pokies

By Kathy Marks

In a room at the back of the Wallan Hotel, a radio station pumping out Blondie’s ‘Atomic’ competes with a chorus of upbeat chirrups and bells, and the occasional clatter of coins. It’s a chilly weekday afternoon and a dozen or so men and women are hunc

Water Policy

Comment

By Mark Aarons

When Malcolm Turnbull announced his retirement from politics in April, he trumpeted his achievement of “a truly revolutionary reform of the way water is managed in Australia”. He rightly referred to the decades of “state run mismanagement of the waters of the Murr

600 Million Rabbits & Myxomatosis

By Shane Maloney

Rabbits are poor conservers of energy. They can’t adapt to drought. Their diet is not diverse. All in all, they are not well suited to the Australian environment. But when it comes to reproduction they can’t be bettered. Mating takes 30 seconds, courtship

Supermarket Sweep

By Benjamin Law

It’s 4.20 am in Kingston, 30 minutes out of Brisbane, and already the place is a hive of human activity. In the darkness, people haul crates out of a huge delivery truck – the words “Tribe of Judah Care Services” printed on its side – and into a warehouse. A m

Frederick Seidel's 'Ooga-Booga and Poems: 1959-2009'

Easy Rider

By Kate Jennings

For your consideration: “A naked woman my age is just a total nightmare.” Now there’s a rip-snorting line of poetry if there ever was one. Frederick Seidel, who is not afraid to repeat himself, offers the line not once but three times in Ooga-Booga (Farr

The National Party

Changing Frontiers

By John Birmingham

The Flinthart of that once-upon-a-time rarely flinched from the confronting, and occasionally violent, practice of direct action when demonstrating his displeasure with the black-hearted devils of the old Bjelke-Petersen regime in Queensland. Thus, he found hi

Backyard Blitz

By John van Tiggelen

When Tony Gibbins comes knocking, you know you've messed up. Gibbins is the Unsightly Properties Officer with the Loddon Shire Council. It says so on his name badge. Most shires prefer a prettier job title, such as Beautification Officer or Environmental Health Officer,

Trekking in the Simpson

A New Desert

By Robyn Davidson

For Indigenous people, who knew it as well as their own bodies (in a sense, their country was both body and mind), it was a large garden that sustained them for thousands of generations. Withholding sometimes, when the dry went on longer than usual, but generally so bountiful that they could gather enough food in a couple of hours to grow fat. When Europeans

Ivy League

By Kate Rossmanith

Our continent has a wretched history of invasive species. Ecosystems have succumbed to exotic animals such as foxes, rabbits and carp, while at the same time being beset by strange, virile plants. "Whenever I travel, I'm always amazed by the hold that exotic species have obtained over this land," says Tim Low of the Invasive Species Council. Two centuries ago, when British fleets brought the first

Society of Birds

By Don Watson

EE Cummings prayed that his heart would always be open to little birds. My family, the maternal side especially, has always shared some of his sentiment. It goes back to the clearing of the forest. As the trees went, the little birds came and dwelt in the hydr

'Caravan Story' By Wayne Macauley

By Martin Shaw

The Big Cheese

By Gay Bilson

In 1837 Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States, ordered that a 1400-pound cheese be placed in the foyer of the White House for those who were hungry and voiceless. The cheddar cut at the traditional welcome for the well-fed and empowered participants

From Frogmore, Victoria

By Helen Garner

There's a brief scene, quite early in the movie, in which Raimond is mooching along a street and sees a teenage girl dancing wildly to a record on her front porch. He calls out and asks her the name of the singer. She tells him it's Jerry Lee Lewis, from Ferriday, Louisiana. "And who are you, when you're at home?" she asks coldly. The screen fills with the boy's eager, unbearably smiling and undef