culture

Unrecognised National Portrait Gallery, Canberra At five, the doors click shut. Security walks a final circuit and clocks off. The eyes of the prominent are lost in the middle distance beyond office, sports field or studio. Hair and skin of oil,...

Remember that year we sat in the stench of death, peering at lighted squares, searching for the numbers of fallen. I was conscious of my breath, conscious of too-close bodies passing in the aisles, conscious of the skin of the oranges, already...

memorial for mass unmarked graves at Barambah-Cherbourg take me to that place where sky and ocean meet — I’ve been missing that place and tonight I will have that dream again — of our Shark with its fins sliced off, bleeding out — my bro died today...

Hello again. The answer to last month’s riddle poem – I’ve been shut up a long time in a dark place/ Flung from my fellow… – was “An odd sock”. I haven’t heard of any alternative answers yet. My sister-in-law was onto it straight away. “Something to...

Did you know violins can shake the earth? Such sweet vessels, tiny planetary throats. I was sent an orchestra. They made music, a sorrow, a soaring, that shivered the dirt. I followed the notes to a barbarism. The composer said he created the...

in the third week of the pandemic schools started closing workers were sent home and they started to call the youngsters: generation zoom named, of course, for that chat-app all of them seemed to use logging in for facetime completing maths lessons...