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Essay

Searing, mind-numbing grief at the loss of my partner of thirteen years was one thing, but such a breach of parking etiquette could not stand. The necessary adjustments were made, and the less serious business of grieving could begin. Later that day my sister weighed in. Her aid came in the form of fifteen ham-and-cheese sandwiches ...

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Nah Doongh was among the first generation of Aboriginal children who grew up in a conquered land. She was born around 1800 in the Country near present-day Kingswood, just south-east of Moorroo Morack, Penrith, and she lived until the late 1890s ...

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It begins with a projected haze of ocean horizon. In this blurry liminal space, silence is misted with anticipation, like the moment before an echo comes back empty, right across the sea. Then a close-up of multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis’s hands unpicking tranquillity’s fabric, each piano note a loosened stitch ...

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The University of Melbourne’s announcement on 30 January 2019 that Melbourne University Publishing would henceforth ‘refocus on being a high-quality scholarly press in support of the University’s mission of excellence in teaching and research’, which led to the resignations of its chief executive, Louise Adler ...

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Do people hate poetry, as the title of Ben Lerner's terrific book-sized essay implies? In Lerner's account, poetry is associated with hatred and contempt, even by ...

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As a freshwater ecologist, Alison Pouliot endeavours to understand the interplay of the processes that sculpt the Australian environment.

As an environmental photographer, she aspires to capture the intricacies and obscurities of these processes.

The insidious creeping nature of drought can sometimes lend itself more to images than words.

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Mary Cunnane, who has worked in the publishing industry since 1976, laments the laziness and irritation of those publishers who resent and underestimate unsolicited submissions from authors

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Much travel is unpleasant (with over-expectations, too many tourists, and long distances from Australia), but even the sedentary or timorous persist with it in some ‘misguided duty to culture’, as Brendan Shanahan describes in his first collection of essays, Mr Snack and the Lady Water. Assembling journeys from the mid-1990s until now, Shanahan recounts stories that range from the inequities of post-Apartheid South Africa to his experience with so-called ‘dental tourism’ in the Philippines. The result of these peripatetic years has been, as the book’s subtitle suggests, largely uneventful: lost to the author and this reader alike.

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‘I’m sitting in my tower, cogitating.’ Well, Dessaix admits, it’s not a real tower, though he likes to think of it that way. Actually, it is an elevated writing room in his house in Hobart, with a view of the mountains to the west. He is cogitating, not meditating – he’s particular about this – and the thoughts he proceeds to capture on the page are those of a mind given to rambling. As he sits there, the train of thought moves off to connect him with other writers in other towers, widely distant in place and time: Vita Sackville-West at Sissinghurst in Kent, Michel de Montaigne in rural France, W.B. Yeats in County Galway, Rainer Maria Rilke at the Château de Muzot in Switzerland.

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In Australia, fewer than one in three expected deaths takes place outside an institution, but eighty per cent of people say they would rather die at home.

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