I am sitting in a 4WD, belting along the dirt road which heads west from Uluru. I am taking it all in: the remoteness, the redness, the harshness. I am excited, and apprehensive....
The politics of water in the sunshine state
There’s something about Mary
On the night of 26 April this year, Kaili Parker-Price was driving home towards the family farm, just outside the little town of Imbil in Queensland's Mary Valley. The energetic...
The joy of sport
Manning Clark, historian, writer and lover of the Carlton Football Club, was convinced that sport mattered in Australia. “Football,” he wrote, “is like going to a play about the...
Zero Millimetres in Tooleybuc
In the Cricketers Bar at Melbourne’s Windsor Hotel, shortly after the Swans’ AFL grand final victory, a bloke from Sydney told me the ABC was doctoring the weather. He claimed he...
To understand the place you must first understand the Bundaberg Bear
Queensland. What is it?
Sarge, a Sunshine Coast solicitor, was born in the north. He grew up knocking around the beaches outside Sarina. He loves the weather and the water. And fishing. He’s going out on...
To understand the place you must first understand the Bundaberg Bear
Queensland. What is It?
I watch the Melbourne of my imagination disappear under low clouds. Urbane Melbourne, where conversation matters, where people take an interest in what is going on and have a...
It’s raining at last in the bush, where there is no confidence, only hope.
Drought essay: There’s mud in Manangatang
If you want to find out about Australia you shouldn’t take a trip to the bush. It will tell you about the bush, or wherever you are in the bush, but I’m not sure it will tell you...
Street talk
On the cover of the first Australian edition of Vice, a free street magazine published about once a month, a bloodied rat lay dead on a metal floor. Inside were lots of cool ads...
Stop the pigeons
In The Meaning of Liff, Douglas Adams’s book of words that should exist but don’t, he proposed the term “sheppy”: the closest distance, equal to approximately seven-eighths of a...
Ken Trewick and the amazing race sting
Run and hide
Ken Trewick is late. Which is very unlike Ken Trewick. He told me he’d pick me up at 9.30. And as I stand in the sunshine on the footpath outside my brother’s old Queensland house...
