Back in the late 2000s, I undertook a weekly pilgrimage. Each Saturday, I would catch two trains to the opposite side of Melbourne, walk for 30 minutes along a sun-baked main road, then stand sentry for several hours in an airconditioned room as still and silent as a chapel. The task was equal parts dull and stressful: nothing ever happened and the minutes crept by with agonising slowness, but hypervigilance was required as at any moment priceless artwork could be destroyed on my watch. All it would take was a single errant toddler or pen-wielding vandal.
It's winter 2016 and your year began with severe illness, an abusive relationship, moving interstate, and now deep depression in your cold new Melbourne sharehouse. The Henderson poverty line is currently $425.61 per week1, and your disability support pension is about $20 below that. You pick up odd jobs as a freelance writer when you can, working from bed when you're too ill to make it to the couch, and crowdfunding to keep your head above water. You're barely covering the rent for your small sitting-room-turned-bedroom. Your chronic illness has gotten worse, leaving you mostly housebound and in untreatable pain. You're doing it all on your own. No carer, no support worker, no help from family or a partner.
The Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation has a recipe for health and success. It's a recipe perfected by the Dja Dja Wurrung Ancestors over millennia. But there's something missing.
How has artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT changed our society-and us? These questions seem important for us as people of the word, so to speak-creators and appreciators of literary work-as we adjust to AI's dramatic encroachment into what has traditionally been 'our' space. In order to begin to answer, we need to go well beyond a focus on the software and code, and into larger considerations of the structure and nature of our society. New technology never appears in a vacuum; it is always as an expression of larger patterns of human relationships and behaviour.
As the night of 14 October wore on, it became clear fairly quickly that the referendum to enshrine an Indigenous Voice to Parliament would be defeated. For some, this was a source of elation; for many others, profound sadness. However, for a discrete group of Australians-those with even a passingly competent understanding of the complexity of the Australian constitution-there was a distinct accompanying feeling. That feeling was resignation, informed by the knowledge that any attempt to amend the constitution was always going to be immensely difficult.
A woman is tasked with cooking dessert for Thanksgiving. She spends the afternoon meticulously putting together a traditional English trifle, making custard from scratch and carefully slicing bananas. She sautes beef with peas and onions. Oh. Wait.
Arrernte languages come from the land itself. Our language is sacred to us. Every Aboriginal language is sacred for those who speak it. Words are given to us by the land and these words are sacred. Language is the flesh of our land and it is alive and meaningful to us. It is sacred to us and is grown from the land itself. Speaking Arrernte is sacred to the land because it contains stories that are meaningful only to those particular families who come from that particular country. A person knows his or her language and knows that their language is born out of the living flesh of the land, because arrenge ikwerenhe, his father's father, is a language speaker like this, and aperle ikwerenhe, his father's mother, is a language Arrernte people used language in a very strong cultural knowledge way. They lived in their own country speaking, and they would go out together collecting food and hunting together, speaking that same language from that land. They lived with their children growing up listening to that language from their grandparents. By living on the land, the children grew with the land and had strong language to We identify ourselves, who we are and where we are from, by listening to the same family groups who speak to each other with the same language. We recognise each other by the different words that are used in the different manner. That is The root of the language is the creation of the land that, in turn, created the
What is the relationship between writing-so often a lonely pursuit-and the nation, that slippery idea that is supposed to contain us all? And isn't there something missing here, something between writing and the nation?
This essay began with another one. One I didn't write about a decade ago. I was asked to write an opinion piece about Universal Basic Income (UBI) for artists. I'd been open about the role long-term unemployment had played in shaping my early life. Unemployment benefits kept me going for most of my teens and early twenties. The incredibly meagre capital of a $500 'dole loan' had seed-funded the early creative projects that led me to where I am today. At the time I started down the UBI rabbit hole, but in the end I delayed and ultimately declined to write that piece-because the more I thought about it, the more I needed to.
After my second book came out, I was asked to do a lecture on 'Writing as Method'. I wasn't sure what the term meant but I said yes because it was flattering to think my method was good enough to warrant talking about it. On top of that, the audience was mostly post-grads and I felt very empathetic towards them. I remember how it felt to write a thesis; sitting there day after day, deleting, rewriting, and wondering what I was doing wrong.
'There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?'1 1 Accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature at the presentation banquet in Stockholm in December 1950, William Faulkner opened with a remark that must have made a few in the audience choke on their celebratory champagne. But the observation captured the gloomy mood of the time. Five years earlier, the war in the Pacific had ended with the atomic obliteration of two Japanese cities. Relief that the conflict was over had been replaced by the depressing knowledge that humanity now had the means to self-destruct, and the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in competition to devise and test bombs even more devastating than those that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
