Pharmacy | The Monthly

The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

Sydney Gets a Laneway

By Drusilla Modjeska

Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art on Circular Quay West re-opened on 29 March with a new wing, as the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Abutting the old building with its whiff of Art Deco, and glancing across to the Opera House, its stepped facade of white blocks creates a shifting pattern of light and shadow, as viewed from the harbour ferries, Bennelong Point or the lawn outside. T

Trixie Gardner

Long in the Tooth

By Paola Totaro

The Baroness Gardner of Parkes, Conservative member of the British House of Lords, waves me through the Peers’ Lobby and with an informal “This way!” called over her shoulder, she presses onward and upward into the Gothic gold and stone splendour of Westminster Palace’s innards. Diminutive, perfectly coiffed, she walks briskly and without the creaky gait characteristic of those in the

Inside the Pillbox: Bullying in the Workplace

By Gail Bell

I ought to be well beyond 3 am revenge plots against the workplace bully but when it’s too hot to sleep and the frog outside my window is sounding his relentless serenade my thoughts take on a cauldron intensity. Where do these coiffed, armour-plated bullies spring from? What womb? What sick nursery of competing siblings? Why must the victims grapple with diplomacy and psychology and workplace relations, when the answer could be brewi

Lice Infestations in Australia

Lousy Science

By Christine Kenneally

In a laboratory in the Faculty of Veterinary Science at the University of Melbourne, Vern Bowles slides a Petri dish into a microscope and centres it on two coffee-brown lice eggs: one is full and opaque, the other empty and almost entirely translucent. Suspended to their right, like a distorted astrological sign, is a big, fat louse. The microscope illumina

Hair Apparent

By Alice Pung

Mr Abe Lourie is 81, and tells me that he is in perfect health. Every morning he walks up two flights of stairs to open his store. The lift has been broken for quite some time and yet customers continue to come up, because for half a century he has helped fill

The Methadone Program at 40

Liquid Handcuffs

By Gail Bell

Two old hands who dose at the pharmacy where I work (a couple, Danny and Carla) have been using since they were 18. They are in their forties now, have raised their kids (the eldest is at university), and keep a neat house in the suburbs. This is their third g

Croakers

By Gail Bell

When Michael Jackson’s heart stopped beating on 25 June, he was lean, only 50 years old, and sufficiently fit to lay down enough of his trademark stage moves to refute rumours about advanced physical deterioration. Even before the first ambiguous cause-of-death report

Cold Comfort

By Nick Bryant

Shirt by fluorescent-orange shirt, the quilt will take shape: a gaudy patchwork emblazoned with the logo of the world's biggest mining company, BHP Billiton, and embroidered with the names of its one-time employees who now have lost their jobs. Shirts are bein

Endnotes

By Gail Bell

I came to know Eddie at second hand, through my husband. There was much to love about Eddie, and much to wonder about. I knew he had a liver disease aggravated by decades of drinking and yet persisted with his haphazard lifestyle. He still smoked tobacco, still liked a

The legal trade behind the manufacture of methamphetamines

Running Dogs

By Gail Bell

In my experience, most people needing sinus tablets take the identification requirement on the chin. It's an ID-dependent world now: you have to prove who you are at the video shop, the bank, the Medicare counter, and even at schools when you're the aunt colle

Beyond Left & Right in industrial relations

Open All Hours

By Diana Bagnall

Dobbing on Dr Raad

"Oh My God. He's Done it Again"

By Nicholas Shakespeare

It was a late April morning in 2001 and my wife had taken our seven-month-old son to the Swansea surgery for a routine jab – the final set of shots for whooping cough, diphtheria and tetanus. This was the first week of the new doctor and she was curious to see what he