Rubrica

Florence est morte . Alas, poor Florence ... I came out to the living room yesterday morning to find Florence, my resident huntsman (huntsperson?) spider in her usual position high on the wall above the bookcase. But instead of her typical noble bearing with legs outstretched, her legs were curled in towards her body. She remained that way all day, and this morning, there was only her little corpse, curled up on the floor. I'll miss her. I hope she left some progeny in my house to continue her good work. Huntsman spiders are vastly underrated as household pets. They find their own food, don't wake you up at 2.00am because they need to go out, they're quiet and respectful of your personal space. They eat insects that might not be welcome in your house, small lizards, mice, birds, maybe the occasional chihuahua or other smallish dog breed ... They're also playful, in their own way, sometimes appearing unexpectedly from behind curtains or under cushions. If you're won...

  In 2009, the New Oxford American Dictionary proclaimed unfriend as its Word of the Year. It's a rather brutal notion that one can simply delete a friend by clicking on a button. Yet it also brings into question our concept of what it actually means to have a friend in an age of technology. Before social media, when all our friends were people we actually knew, one might fall out with a friend or simply drift apart due to geographic distance or different life paths. "Oh, yes," you might say of a certain former friend, "we were friends once but we had a falling out over what constitutes an appropriate pizza topping and as far as I'm concerned, he and his disgusting pineapple pizza deserve each other." Or, "Yes, I was quite good friends with her, but after she joined that religious cult and moved, we just stopped seeing each other. I wonder how she's going now?" There are other friends with whom we remain close for our entire lives regardless ...

We're only days into Trump 2.0 and already I'm opening the news sites in the morning with a sense of foreboding. A grim but eerily familiar foreboding that requires looking at the headlines through one's fingers while muttering, "oh for fuck's sake what's he done now"? Or, as it will be referred to in this blog for the next four years, #ohFFSwhatshedonenow. That more than 50% of the US voting public opted for a convicted felon as their Head of State and Commander in Chief points to a lot of complex problems within American society and politics that will, no doubt, be the subject of many analyses over the course of the coming years. Cartoon credit: Deccan Herald Trump is basically your standard megalomaniacal bully with a god complex. He is a cult leader who has set himself up as a messiah. What is different, and more worrisome, about his second term, however, is that now he's hellbent on revenge, and like any vengeful god, he wants his enemies gone. Th...

 I live and work on the land of the Walbunja people of Yuin nation. This is important. Knowing the traditional name of the place where I have made my home anchors me to the history of my country: a history that stretches back thousands of millennia before my forebears arrived here, less than two centuries ago. As a descendant of immigrants, I have no ancestral ties to the land to which I was born. This is the case for the vast majority of Australians. Our ancestral ties are elsewhere.  So what is it that gives us a sense of belonging? A sense that this land is, after all, home? The Indigenous map of Australia Traditional place names matter. When the British colonised the land mass they named New South Wales (despite its bearing no resemblance at all to old South Wales), they brought with them, and bestowed upon the newly colonised country their place names. Whether this was due to an arrogant claim of ownership, homesickness or just lack of imagination will never be known....

 Living in the present moment, or what the well-being industry calls ‘mindfulness’, has become one of those words that is overused to the point of meaninglessness. Like resilience, sustainability and wellness, it has come to be used as a vague umbrella term for a range of behaviours and attitudes that are, on the face of it, positive, but which require conscious effort to put into action. Just saying one is resilient or living sustainably doesn’t guarantee any change from the non-resilient or unsustainable self. Adopting the words alone makes no change. In a capitalist world there is also a strong “ka-ching” value to these words. There’s any number of entrepreneurs, influencers and con-artists happy to sell you wellness, mindfulness, resilience, sustainability and a host of other zeitgeist buzzwords for a price.  There’s no end to the products you can buy, the workshops you can attend, the books you can read, the websites you can subscribe to, phone apps to download, celebrity...