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Mobile Phones

Comment: Phoney Education

By Don Watson
The best measure of the boon these phones have been is to recall the woe of life before them. Just 15 years ago on trams and trains people buried their heads in books, newspapers and periodicals, searching for the precious little information they contained, or stared out the windows at a world going past that without Wikipedia they could not begin to understand. People knew very little then.
The Ledbury

London Calling

By MJ Hyland
On 8 August, during the London riots, Brett Graham’s restaurant, The Ledbury, was invaded by looters. “There were 30 of them and they outnumbered the customers,” Graham told me. They used bricks to smash the front door and threatened diners with broken glass, robbed necklaces, watches and mobile phones, and used baseball bats to destroy the innards of the dining room; tables, chairs, pl
Why Dialling ‘000’ May Not Save Your Life

Triple Zero’s Emergency

By Christine Kenneally
A few years ago in Terrey Hills, NSW, a man stumbled upon the collapsed body of a jogger who had had a heart attack. He called triple zero, but wasn’t sure exactly where he was. The first four minutes of a heart attack are critical for survival. Yet, because it was so hard to pin down the jogger’s location, it took an hour for emergency services to find him. The man died. Twenty years ago, virtually all triple zero calls were from l

Life Sentence

By Victoria Laurie
His father, Anthony, has since graduated to one of Perth’s higher security prisons, which is also where Malcolm’s 21-year-old brother, Tyson, is serving his sentence. Malcolm’s 14-year-old cousin, Jayden, is in and out of juvenile detention, and his 23-year-old stepsister, Charlene, is in Western Australia’s only high-security women’s prison. Charl

‘Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E Smith’ by Mark E Smith (with Austin Collings)

By Gideon Haigh
In the Age of Noise

Living

By Robyn Davidson
Opinions are antagonistic to wisdom, even when they're right, which they seldom are. People cling to their opinions until history proves those opinions catastrophically wrong, but isn't it amusing that even when their opinions have been proved wrong, time and

Lies, Damned Lies

By Charles Firth
My mum has been lying to me. It's either her or Telstra, and I always take Telstra at its word, so it must be Mum.This month marks the first anniversary of Justice Peter Gray's ruling that Optus offers better value than Telstra. Telstra had tried to stop Optus running a

The Silence of the Phones

By Alice Pung
"If you tell your leg to stop hurting," says the Venerable Monk, "does it listen to you?" We're not meant to look at him when he's speaking. We have to focus on our sitting, because he's walking around with the incense board in his hand. The incense board is l

The Other End of Town

By Alice Pung
I take my sister up Melbourne's Collins Street, to show her the office where I work. It is at the end of the street where boutiques display shirts whose stripes meet perfectly at the seams, and where Burberry bags outnumber Big Issue vendors. Here, the women's faces loo

Throwing the Book

By Alice Pung
The Old Man is sitting on a plastic chair outside the room, his hand resting on his wooden cane. His left leg cannot bend at the knee because an epoch ago the barefoot doctors in China gave him the wrong medicine for a minor foot injury. Now his leg sticks out

Queen Emily of the High Cs

By Kerryn Goldsworthy