Happy new year! Just the one resolution this year: to keep notes, just brief ones, on the books I read. A memory aid, really. So here’s my first instalment, a few snack-size reviews …
The joke
I told my GP a joke the other day. It was only a short joke, one of the few I know by heart. She pressed her hands to her cheeks and stared at me. Dr G is a broadminded, competent, compassionate doctor. She’s quite easy-going. I arrived at one appointment to find her wearing shorts…
Kelpie Zed, truffle-snuffler
Zed*, at six years, was a happy, healthy companion dog living an easy life in a Triangle village. She loved her daily walks, chasing balls, chewing bones. But Zed was a dog without a job—until this past winter when her human, Elly*, saw a notice on the Cobargo Forum: ‘Truffle dogs required’.
The grinning tradie. Or, if the NDIS collapses, this is why
The tradesman was grinning. He’d brought a subcontractor with him. It took them about 30 minutes to scope out the job and jot some figures in a notebook. Of course he was grinning—my occupational therapist, who’d suggested the home modification he was quoting for, had told me that he was charging $500 for the quote,…
What’s a forest worth?
‘Most people in Melbourne know who runs around in tight shorts and kicks goals for Carlton or Collingwood but they have no idea where their water comes from.’ Professor David Lindenmayer This is a story about science, but it’s also a story about wilful ignorance, a looming catastrophe, and, to run with the football reference,…
Us and Them? Really?
Goulburn Shopping Centre, 11 am last Tuesday. I’m waiting for someone to vacate the disabled toilet. I see a dim form approach the frosted glass door and as it slides open my suspicions are confirmed: an able-bodied person. As he steps out he looks down at me (I’m on my small electric scooter), says, ‘Sorry!’…
The regions, migration and discomfort with ‘the other’: John Daley on the rise of the minor parties.
Since the 1970s the Australian electorate has become increasingly disenchanted with the major parties. Lately this has accelerated. At the last federal election, the minor parties (including the Greens) attracted 36% of the vote. But this pattern is not spread evenly across the population; the minor party vote is a lot higher in regional areas….
80 per cent curiosity, 20 per cent hope
On the highway, heading into Bega. Royal blue summer sky, black and white cows dotted across unseasonably green hills. I turn to the Mechanic. ‘I think I might be depressed.’ ‘Well, that’s fair enough,’ he says. ‘I’d be depressed if I were you, considering everything. I’m amazed you’re not depressed more often.’ As validating as…
Pumped hydro: this could just be the solution to the energy storage problem
One hundred percent renewable energy to power Australia? It sounds like a pipe-dream—unless you were in the audience at the Bermagui Institute Dinner at Il Passaggio on 21 September to hear Andrew Blakers, Professor of Engineering at the Australian National University, speak about pumped hydro energy storage.
The EDO’s Sue Higginson: solastalgia, subplots and lawfare
NSW Environmental Defenders Office CEO Sue Higginson paints a picture of EDO lawyers, haggard and caffeinated, racing between their office on Clarence Street and the Land and Environment Court on Macquarie Street, chasing “mining companies with the deepest pockets you can imagine” and “lawyers who lodge Notices of Motion at 1 am”. It’s comical until…