Gender
Taboo by Hannah Ferguson
For Hannah Ferguson, the real meaning of a taboo is ‘a conversation which frays the fabric of patriarchy. A subject clouded in stigma which serves systems and institutions of power.’
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November 2024, no. 470
That winter it was bad and he often woke a little before midnight with his teeth aching and he would dress quickly and walk through the snow for an hour or so and later, when he came home, he saw the lights burning softly at her window. She didn’t seem to sleep much. Sometimes he stopped in the hallway and listened at her door but there was little to hear. Once he heard the squeak of a cork but there weren’t any voices and he liked the thought of her having a late night drink, alone, while the building slept.
In 1919 a major outbreak of pneumonic influenza threatened the livelihoods of actors and musicians throughout Australia, and forced a tense confrontation between artists and government officials in Melbourne.
This week on The ABR Podcast Johanna Leggatt reviews Australia’s Pandemic Exceptionalism: How we crushed the curve but lost the race by Steven Hamilton and Richard Holden. She quotes from the book: ‘There will be another pandemic. It might not happen for another century, or it might happen very soon.’ Johanna Leggatt is a Melbourne-based writer and journalist. Listen to Johanna Leggatt’s “‘We right to go?’ Heeding the lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic”, published in the October issue of ABR.
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The far margin of wintering wetlands,
mist before sunrise. Outside my window
a rock parrot is perched on its fence-post.
When I discovered that a novel set in my native Newfoundland had won the 1993 Irish Times International Fiction Prize, I was a little surprised. Newfoundland, isolated and little known outside Canada, seemed an unlikely setting for an acclaimed novel.
Novelist Fred Dagg, the alter ego of New Zealand refugee John Clarke has quickly established an audience in Australia for his erratic political and social comments. In ‘Novelist’, transcribed here from his record of The Fred Dagg Tapes he offers advice to aspiring writers.