'It's my hormones, doc. It's my hormones, and no one's listened to that.' It was the late 1980s, in what was once Royal Park Psychiatric Hospital in inner-city Melbourne. A brash young...
MANGOES ARE DEEPLY embedded in my childhood. Even now the smell or taste of the fruit connects me instantly to hot summers in Brisbane. I can see myself as a seven-year-old sitting under the sprinkler with mango juice running through my fingers, fighting my siblings for the seed. Sweet, sticky mangoes signalled that summer had begun, school was over and holidays had started. Mangoes just seemed to arrive – and in abundance. How that happened, of course, meant nothing to me. Looking back, I think my lifelong passion for mangoes began to bud in that time.
It would be disconcerting to wake up one day and discover that everything we thought was real in the world we live in was simply a fantasy constructed out of some flimsy, mismatched old metaphors. ...
Background • Field of public administration • A reflection on involvement in public sector reviews over nearly 40 years, emphasising how much circumstances typically change between commissioning and delivery Research Contribution • An argument about the nature of public service reviews, with the optimistic hope that good ideas, even if rejected by one government, will catch the attention of successors, and eventually be introduced Significance • The article was written on completion of Our Public Service Our Future, an 18 months review of the Australian Public Service submitted to Prime Minister Morrison in late 2019. It was written in anticipation of likely government reaction, but without knowing how the report would be received. As it turned out, the strike rate reflected earlier experiences - some recommendations were accepted but many key findings were rejected, particularly those relating to departmental head appointments, ministers, ministerial staff and the need for enhanced integrity mechanisms within Commonwealth public administration. Perhaps, following the logic of the argument, they will find favour with future administrations.
In December 2005, Gough Whitlam was at the National Archives of Australia in Canberra speaking on the occasion of the third and final release of Cabinet records of the Whitlam government. It was ho...
It was a muffled cheer. On 19 October 2017, it rose from behind a stiff oak door in New Zealand's Parliament Buildings and drifted down narrow corridors decorated with stern-faced portraits of hist...
I lean over, kiss her forehead and pull up a chair. She's in a dark-blue nightie and is lying on her side, legs drawn up beneath her like a dying bird, arms held out in front of her, bent at the elbows across her scrawny chest.
When I turned sixty last year, I entered a year\u0027s worth of birthday celebrations with friends to mark the milestone. I was the first cab off the rank in March, with other birthday celebrations punctuating the subsequent months. There were seven of us in total, born in 1959, the same year as Barbie. To have your life run parallel to a plastic icon is more than a little strange, and although I may not have reached the heights of some of her sixtieth anniversary incarnations, such as Astronaut Barbie, I have tried to do my bit in the battle for gender equality waged by so many.
I've been thinking about how my body inhabits place and how it changes - fluctuating between comfort and pain - depending on the state of my illness. While reading Chris Kraus in bed, I'm caught by an obscure reference to a study where people who are not experiencing mental illness are admitted to psychiatric institutions. The idea feels like a transformation I need to seek out, one that unpicks the very conception of mental illness. Could this study answer questions that have been bubbling beneath my skin for months? I spend half an hour searching for it, my body filled with an odd urgency until it is before me: 'On Being Sane in Insane Places', published in 1973. The first line reads: 'If sanity and insanity exist, how shall we know them?' It's a surprise, finding this kind of language in an academic study: I've spent years reading medical journals in search of answers about my own obscure diagnosis, so I'm used to both absolutes and qualifications. But I'm still left with questions: how does place influence our minds? And if sanity and insanity do exist, how can we be sane in an insane place?
I'm running on a beach near Cairns, spending a rare holiday moment trying to regain some of the fitness I've lost to far too much international travel. Next week it's to Hong Kong to speak at a symposium hosted by the Independent Commission Against Corruption and the World Justice Project. Then to Nairobi for a meeting of the Transparency International board - joining colleagues spread from Santiago to Istanbul to Phnom Penh, working together in the global coalition against corruption - followed by more meetings in London, Berlin and Malaysia.
IN LATE 2018, fifteen Griffith University communication and journalism students travelled to Vanuatu to participate in a climate change communication study tour funded by the New Colombo Plan. The tour was built around planning and adaptation projects being undertaken by the Griffith Climate Change Response Program, and was initiated in partnership with the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme and the University of the South Pacific.
In late October 2010, I found myself in the city of San Francisco for the first time. I was at Hub SoMa, one of the city's exploding number of co-working spaces, and I was running an event with author Rachel Botsman for the final leg of the US and European tour for her first book, What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption (HarperCollins, 2010). The start-up mad city was a global epicentre for a growing movement Rachel had defined as 'collaborative consumption' - now better known as the 'sharing economy' - and we had organised a line-up of emerging entrepreneurs to talk about their fledgling and increasingly controversial business models. These included John Zimmer, co-founder of carpooling start-up Zimride (which, two years later, evolved to become ridesharing business Lyft, Uber's most serious competitor), and Brian Chesky, co-founder of home-sharing start-up Airbnb (then just two years old). If both these founders and their businesses have become part of global sharing-economy folklore, our event barely drew a crowd of thirty. This was in part because it was a terrible idea to schedule anything on the night of the second game of the San Francisco Giants' World Series play-offs in a baseball-mad city - especially when they would go on to win the title after an almost sixty-year drought. But that night I nevertheless realised I had one of the earliest and most unique vantage points to a different kind of history in the making, a zeitgeist that would over the following years become a game-changing worldwide movement and business model revolution.
In 2011, as a researcher interested in death and mourning, I decided to explore the now 'mature' virtual social world Second Life. It is a vast, online geography that replicates with astonishing detail extravagant real-world places such as New York, Paris and London while also containing more mundane copies of shopping malls, beaches, churches, mosques, amusement parks, cafes and suburbs. These virtual places are populated with 'residents', people who set up lives with other users of the platform.
Some thirteen years ago I attended the funeral of three young boys. The oldest was just eleven. They were killed by a train on Saturday 11 March 2006 while walking on railway tracks in a suburb south-west of Brisbane.
It's May, the end of the wet season in Far North Queensland, and storm clouds brew ominously to the north. We've already driven for three hours from Mossman, including an hour along the four-wheel-...
