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Debi Hamilton

This week’s ABR Podcast is a commentary from writer and psychologist Debi Hamilton on the world’s growing addiction to background noise. With sound in increasing volumes filling ever more space – from taxis to restaurants, gyms to shops – what does it function to do, psychologically and socially? ... (read more)

Back in the early 1980s, when I was working in Canberra as a public servant in an open-plan office, I obtained a doctor’s certificate declaring that I was allergic to cigarette smoke. I wasn’t – not at least in any strict medical sense. I was merely a healthy non-smoker who found being enveloped in clouds of second-hand cigarette smoke distressing and unpleasant.

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Future Tense with Debi Hamilton in the June-July issue of Australian Book Review.

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It was watching the empty buses leave in the dark outside the restaurant that did it. I was eating with my lover and my daughter on a June evening in Altona when I found myself being distracted by the rooms of light, quite empty, that floated behind my daughter's back. Every ten or fifteen minutes there would be another one heading off into the night, passengerless, ...

Digging in the garden I found a moth
albinoed on a piece of bark by the fence.
Those were my radiation days; it was good
to lay down the spade and kneel in the soil.

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Last week I received an envelope in the mail, the address written in my father’s hand. My heart accelerated a little and it struck me as unseemly, at my age and in my circumstances, to be still so easily rattled by a parent.

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