Article
Meek No More
By Helen Garner, July 2012
The teenager in pyjamas on the dawn flight from Newcastle, entranced by her reflection in a magnifying mirror, spent the trip applying a full face of make-up. From her headset issued the standard tss tss tss, but at such savage volume that the white-haired old man beside her, in pain, had to lean right out into the aisle to read his book. Passengers in nearby rows, young and old, stood up in disbelief, then subsided with their hands over their ears.
Article
Leaving 'Tracks' behind
By Robyn Davidson, October 2012
The past caves away and dissolves behind us, leaving a few clues with which we try to reconstruct it. Hopeless task. History lives in the present. It is over 30 years since I walked across half of Australia with my dear camels and dog. If I concentrate, I can retrieve flashes of a particular place, the affection I had for my animals, the happiness of walking into that transcendent landscape, the klutziness of fear when its indifference was brought home to me by some small, potentially lethal mistake. But they vanish quickly.
Article
Death in Brunswick
By Helen Garner, November 2012
The rooftop bar was buzzing, late on a warm Friday afternoon. My friend and I found a spot under an umbrella and ordered up. Each of us was secretly longing to talk about the fact that the cops had charged a man with the rape and murder of Jill Meagher, but before we could get to it, five youngish blokes strode into the bar, disposed themselves grandly around the next table, and began to roar and bellow. People turned to them, brows creasing but faces carefully blank. The men were throwing back lurid cocktails. The sonic level soared.
Article
Show day
By Cate Kennedy, December 2012
The chief judge in the wool-classing division at our local agricultural show hails us excitedly as we come through the main gates. “When you get a chance, get down and see the entries in the wool pavilion,” he says. “They’re just top quality ... some of those superfine fleeces score 93%!”
Article
An expatriate returns
By Sheila Fitzpatrick, February 2013
According to the US Expatriation Act of 1868, to leave one’s country is “a natural and inherent right of all people, indispensable to the enjoyment of the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Who but Americans would have thought of putting that into law? Yet it’s certainly how I saw things 50 years ago, when I was 21. Leaving Australia, leaving Melbourne in particular, was not just a right but a duty. Because it was boring and parochial. Because real life was elsewhere.
Article
Bonfire of sole
By John Bryson, March 2013
Reviled as a traitor for his leftist agitations, war correspondent Wilfred Burchett held the one dinner menu he would allow at our table in La Closerie des Lilas, Boulevard du Montparnasse, ready to order for the four of us, confident of his own fine judgement.
Article
‘Welcome to Your New Life’ book extract
Vox
By Anna Goldsworthy, April 2013
When you are six weeks old, your grandmother Mariah offers to babysit, so that Nicholas and I can venture out to a restaurant. We discuss this for some days: it is a curiously threatening idea.
“Perhaps we could catch up on some sleep instead,” I suggest.
“Pathetic,” he says, but I can see that he is tempted.
Article
Death in Amsterdam
Vox
By Margaretta Pos, May 2013
One spring day in Hobart, I was having dinner with my son and Goshwin, my Dutch half-brother, who was visiting us, when the telephone rang. My son answered it. “Grandpa!” he exclaimed, as he always did whenever my father called. Yes, we were together, and he passed the handset to Goshwin, who listened, then stiffened. “I’m coming back,” he said and gave me the phone.
Article
Eve Teasing in India
By Bem Le Hunte, June 2013
We stepped into the temple and quietened as we passed in front of a depiction of Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god, tearing open his chest to reveal Ram and Sita inside: Ram and Sita, eternal consorts, the perfect balance of male and female cosmic forces. Jan’s smile was beatific. Standing in front of this line of gods and goddesses was like standing at the foothills of the Himalayas. This was how he’d always imagined an Indian temple, with the vermilion dust, the gaudy colours and the incense spreading the scent of an invisible sandalwood forest.
Article
Maria versus the Serbs
By Lally Katz, July 2013
“Laila. Laila. I need your help now. If you don’t help me now, I am finish. And we are finish.”
It was Maria on the phone. My 85-year-old Hungarian best friend and neighbour. “I never ask for nothing from no one. But, Laila, I ask you this. You must to help me. I got no one. Will be only Christmas present I ask of you ever. Help me this one time.”
Article
Christopher Pearson remembered
By Anna Goldsworthy, September 2013
It was my birthday, and I was eating cake with my children, when my father arrived.
“It’s Pop! How are you?”
“Not so good actually.” He loitered at the door, away from the children. “I’ve just certified Christopher’s death. He didn’t turn up for Mass this morning. They found him in his bed.”
Article
The medicine
By Karen Hitchcock, September 2013
Among registrars, Mike’s clinical acumen was legendary: he’d touch his stethoscope to a patient’s skin and hear the heart murmuring secrets that none of us could yet hear. In the first weeks of my physician training, he was scheduled to give us a seminar on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). I thought it was a joke; I thought the lecture would turn out to be on heart failure or sleep apnoea or some other disease that renders patients tired. But he walked in wearing pinstriped trousers and started talking about chronic fatigue, the syndrome.
Article
Ill communication
By Karen Hitchcock, October 2013
At my hospital we’re interviewing medical students for their first job and I feel sorry for them, all dressed up in their best suits, hair washed and shiny, fingers still aching from their final exams. I’m no good at scoring humans out of five. How might a “one” present? A three? They’re all smart, hard-working and know what to say, so don’t tell me the score hinges on much more than the panel member’s prejudice. The first had a handful of extra degrees, spent her summers saving lives in scary countries and was confident, articulate and gorgeous. She was definitely a five.
Article
A visit to the nursing home
How we look after the elderly
By Karen Hitchcock, November 2013
The first time I see Irena, we are two doctors down and have a full waiting room. I call her name, four times. Finally she stands up: 94 years old, 125 centimetres tall.
Article
The end of an era
An election, a neighbour, a dog
By Lally Katz, November 2013
On 8 September, the morning after the federal election, I walk two hours from my new place in Balaclava to my old street in Kew. I’m going to see my 86-year-old former neighbour, Maria.
Article
Health care, American style
Motivational slogans and pricey lungs in a US hospital
By Karen Hitchcock, December 2013
It’s months before the world will hold its collective breath because a handful of congressmen don’t want the United States to provide health insurance for the 47 million of its citizens who don’t have it. I’m in the Deep South, having a beer with a senator’s chief of staff, and he’s trying to explain to me why Obamacare is such a bad thing. It’s something to do with the deficit, with taxes and small business, and I’m not following, not even when he shows me a pretty pie chart on his laptop.
Article
The Conversationalist
OMG and other dead prayers
By Frank Moorhouse, December 2013
A friend of mine whom I call the Conversationalist, in the way that 18th-century essayists used such noms de plume (Dr Johnson called himself The Rambler), seems to rather like it. My friend, although not himself a great conversationalist, is interested in how we converse these days. He spends much idle time in coffee shops, trains and bars listening to people’s conversations, or initiating them with, say, cab drivers, so that he can observe them, collect them, as it were. Yes, that’s it – he collects conversations.
Article
Medicine's mission to Mars
Transplants, out-of-body organs and limits to treatment
By Karen Hitchcock, February 2014
When I was a trainee doctor, I worked for a time with a physician who would conduct his limits-to-treatment discussions like this: he’d lean over the gravely ill person in the bed and say, “You know the reason we don’t send people to Mars? It’s not because we can’t get them there, it’s because we can’t get them back.” He’d nod slowly, as if sharing a moment of sad understanding with the patient. Then he’d walk out of the room.
Article
The biggest decisions
Why doctors second-guess themselves
By Karen Hitchcock, March 2014
Researchers relate “decision fatigue” in executives to the degradation of sound judgement and to poor impulse control after hours. Nearing the end of a weekend of dealing with a ward full of sick patients, and faced with a particularly challenging case, I recognise I have it by my own sudden irritability and my desire to decide anything, for a bit of relief.
Article
Fairytale of New York
Will Australia learn from the US's healthcare mistakes?
By Lally Katz, March 2014
Last year, during the United States federal government shutdown, as Republicans and Democrats argued over President Barack Obama’s universal health care program, I was in New York to perform a show. I was staying right near Penn Station in a high-rise hotel full of business people and tourists.
Article
A funny thing happened on the way to Adelaide
A car accident brings an unlikely collection of people together
By Helen Garner, April 2014
Melbourne, Friday, 8 am. In the extreme right-hand lane of the Western Ring Road, three social workers and a writer, or two men and two women, or a married couple and two singletons, were heading at speed for South Australia, when Jim at the wheel cursed under his breath and went for the brakes. Thirty metres ahead an old grey Falcon stood facing the wrong way in our lane, pointing straight at us, its passenger side jammed hard against the Armco railing. Jim swerved into a sliver of space and missed it.
Article
Big pharma
How doctors deal with drug companies
By Karen Hitchcock, May 2014
It was midnight and I was lying awake in bed, thinking that I should have been a surgeon. If something went wrong, I could cut it out. No nonsense, a clear cut. We physicians just sit around trying to protect organs with a bunch of drugs. Protecting organs is like being a soldier in peacetime. You hang out, doodling on script pads, deterring attacks with your presence and with wishful thinking.
Article
At eighty
Forty years of friendship
By Murray Bail, May 2014
During the days before the celebration I looked back to when I first met D. in Sydney. I had been away from Australia for six years, and returned in 1974. I had never lived in Sydney, but then so many Sydney people, I soon realised, were arrivals from all parts of the country and had not been born in Sydney. I knew three or four people, that was all. One of them invited me to a film on a Saturday afternoon at the theatre in Double Bay, which no longer exists, where I could meet D. All I knew of D.
Article
Medicine and the mind-body problem
What is sickness, and how much of it is in our heads?
By Karen Hitchcock, June 2014
I was recently asked to give a presentation about “what makes us sick”. Thinking about that question nearly made my head explode. It’s more like “What doesn’t make us sick?”
Article
Flowers
Love, death and the Serbian flag
By Lally Katz, June 2014
I was in Sydney for work, and I was meant to be going to Brisbane with my boyfriend to attend a talk about his book the next day. We hadn’t seen much of each other for a while because of work travel. I was really excited about going with him. And I was really excited that he wanted me to go. It was slightly out of character for him to want company. I felt this might be the start of a new chapter in our relationship.
Article
Thinking again about palliative care
Dying with dignity means different things to different people
By Karen Hitchcock, July 2014
Before I started studying medicine, my grandmother was diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. I had no idea what that was. “Scarring of the lungs,” she said. When I announced my plan to become a doctor, she was ecstatic with pride. She’d tell anyone who listened. Like the person scanning our groceries at the supermarket. She’d look at him, then at me, then back at him, and I’d know it was coming. “This is my granddaughter.” He’d look up, his face all like, And? She’d lean in and say, “She’s going to be a doctor.” I’d roll my eyes and go, “Nan, jeez …”
Article
Claudette
Remembering “the oldest living transsexual in captivity”
By Meshel Laurie, July 2014
Claudette was one of the oldest transsexual ladies we had on offer in our brothel. One of the oldest, but unchallenged for the title of meanest. In this ramshackle cartoon of a place, which clung on defiantly in a gentrifying bayside suburb of Melbourne, Claudette insisted we receptionists describe her to enquiring trade as being “39 … and some months”. It was ridiculous, but no one dared defy her.
Article
Crazy pills
Our obsession with vitamins is getting out of hand
By Karen Hitchcock, August 2014
Last summer I was swimming at my local pool. It was almost midday and I knew I should get out and under cover to protect my skin, but the cool water and warm sun felt good, and I reasoned that I could probably do with a dose of vitamin D. I saw a woman in a full-body wetsuit make her way to the edge of the pool. She was also wearing socks, mittens and a mask, which left only a small circle of her face exposed.
Article
The dying art of hitchhiking
Catching a ride with strangers is harder than it looks
By Robert Skinner, August 2014
I stood outside Pakenham a hopeful man, trying to hitch a ride from Melbourne to Sydney. I watched all the sensible people drive past. After two hours I was so sunburnt I looked embarrassed to be there. After five hours they were still roaring past, and when a car did finally swerve off the road to pick me up – like talkback radio, it was filled with lunatics.
Article
‘Australian History in 7 Questions’ by John Hirst
Black Inc.; $24.99
By Mark McKenna, July 2014
As an Australian schoolboy in the 1950s, John Hirst was taught “British history, geography and poetry” and sang ‘God Save the Queen’ at assembly. “I never heard of Curtin,” he reminisces, “[but] I did hear of Churchill.” Six decades on, the eminent historian has ditched the trappings of empire loyalty for republicanism, but admiration for British “statecraft” – the rule of law, progressive legislation and parliamentary democracy – has remained an abiding theme in his work.
Article
Orange Is the New Black (Season two)
Netflix; Foxtel Showcase
By Anwen Crawford, August 2014
In the concluding scene of Orange Is the New Black’s first season, we left the show’s ostensible protagonist, Piper Chapman, in a prison-yard fight to the possible death with her fellow inmate Tiffany “Pennsatucky” Doggett, a wild-eyed, rotten-toothed, Bible-bashing former meth addict. It was the evening of the prison’s Christmas pageant, and snow fell as the two women lunged at each other. “You ain’t worthy of nobody’s love!” taunted Pennsatucky, waving a sharpened crucifix at her enemy.
Article
The pill problem
Are GPs prescribing too many antidepressants?
By Karen Hitchcock, September 2014
I was at a party. The host stood up, thanked everyone for coming, toasted his family and then told us he had been diagnosed with depression. He turned his head away and pressed his fingers into his eyes. No one moved. “But it’s OK,” he said. “I understand that what I have is a disease, caused by a chemical imbalance in my brain.”
Worldwide sales of antidepressants make pharmaceutical companies tens of billions of dollars. Each year, 17 million scripts are written in Australia at a cost of more than $533 million. Eighty-five per cent of the scripts are written by GPs.
Article
‘Optimism’ by Bob Brown
Hardie Grant; $39.95
By John van Tiggelen, September 2014
While still a senator, Bob Brown had a “simple philosophy” printed on the back of his business card: “Caring Optimistic Defiant. We strive for peace democracy and a fair go for everyone. We champion future generations and life on Earth in all its brilliance. The future is Green.”
It’s a lot to fit on the back of a card. It is also enough to clog Optimism: Reflections on a life of action, which Brown introduces as “some stories from my journey to this simple philosophy for happiness”.
Article
‘Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage’ by Haruki Murakami (trans. Philip Gabriel)
Random House; $35
By Kevin Rabalais, September 2014
His name carries a cultural cachet rarely granted writers today, much less those of the literary variety. As a brand, Haruki Murakami infiltrated the West with the English translation of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997), but in his native Japan he had been a celebrity since Norwegian Wood (1987). His latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, sold a million copies in its first week in Japanese bookstores.
Article
‘Born Bad’ by James Boyce
Black Inc.; $34.99
By Michael Cooney, September 2014
At the end of Born Bad: Original sin and the making of the Western world, James Boyce tells us where he stood at the start. When the Tasmania-based historian began researching this ambitious survey, he was “scornful of a barbaric doctrine”. No surprise there – this is billed as a “grand history of ideas” that name-checks Alain de Botton and Richard Dawkins. We don’t expect a sympathetic account of the Christian notion that we are all weakened and inclined to evil through the hereditary stain of Adam’s sin.
Article
Looking for trouble
Does medical screening do more harm than good?
By Karen Hitchcock, October 2014
I’ve had a mammogram request slip folded into the side pocket of my purse for two years. My GP gave it to me when I turned 40, telling me the time had come to start being screened. I put it in my purse and mostly forgot about it, feeling a slight tug of anxiety whenever it emerged in a wad of receipts. I’ll get to it soon, I’d think. Plan made.
Article
The good story
Truth, fiction and psychotherapy
By JM Coetzee & Arabella Kurtz, October 2014
JMC
“The stories we tell about ourselves may not be true, but they are all we have.”
I am interested in our relations with these stories we tell about ourselves, stories that may or may not be true. Let me select three cases.
(a) I have a story about myself which I sincerely believe to be true, in fact which I believe to be the story of me, but which some ideal, omniscient, God-like observer who is entirely independent of me and to whose mind I have no access knows not to be true, or at least not to be the whole truth.
Article
‘Acute Misfortune’ by Erik Jensen
Black Inc.; $32.99
By Geordie Williamson, October 2014
Robert Hughes’s notorious 1988 demolition of the New York art-world darling Jean-Michel Basquiat was called ‘Requiem for a Featherweight’. Erik Jensen’s brief, episodic biography of Adam Cullen could not be further from Hughes’s article in tone: neither lordly in condemnation nor malicious in intent. Both efforts, however, concerned as they are with widely popular, boundary-pushing artists, could carry the same title.
Article
‘Stone Mattress’ by Margaret Atwood
Bloomsbury; $25.99
By Claire Corbett, October 2014
“Without the bone and sinew of wings, no flight,” muses one character in Stone Mattress, the latest book of stories from Margaret Atwood. This line, a reflection that all we are can only be felt and expressed through the body, also serves as an artistic credo, on the way the detail and grit of the mundane give force to the imagination. Atwood calls these nine stories “tales”, signalling a playfulness with genre and claiming some of the freedom of the “wonder tale” as told by writers such as Robert Louis Stevenson.
Article
‘Golden Boys’ by Sonya Hartnett
Penguin; $29.99
By Robyn Annear, October 2014
As is often the case in a Sonya Hartnett novel, the kids in Golden Boys know too much.
Early on, Hartnett tells us that “Freya Kiley has started to see things she hasn’t seen before”. Not yet 13, Freya considers that her parents’ marriage, before she was born, “wasn’t so long ago”. Isn’t the conceivable past, at that age, still bracketed by one’s own life span? Colt Jenson, also 12, “wonders if this is what growing up is – this unbuckling of faith, the isolation”.
