Blog
Travel in the Time of Coronavirus
Cancelled flights, missed connections, airport chaos, and a 72 hour journey home Of course I knew that travelling to Europe would carry some risks. But as I breezed through my five-week holiday, I skimmed over news articles about airport chaos and considered myself...
No Politician Should Be Above Criticism (Even the Ones You Like)
Once, in simpler times, I had a heated conversation in a bar after I criticised then-President Obama’s significant expansion of the US drone war in the Middle East. My friend accused me of being a “Bush supporter” and walked out without finishing her glass of wine....
Why Aren’t We Seeing More Child-Free Women On-Screen?
When I think about how women are portrayed on-screen, the final image in the 1999 romantic comedy Notting Hill comes to mind. In a montage laden with sentimentality, we are whisked through Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts’ romantic life — culminating in a scene on a park...
My Ultra-Religious High School Became a COVID-19 Cluster
No matter how hard you try, it seems you can’t escape your childhood. Even if you unfriend everyone you went to school with, leave the WhatsApp chat group, ignore invitations to your 5, 10, and 15 year reunions, and move interstate — you can still turn on the news and...
In Lockdown, Time Has No Meaning
Today is Monday. I know because I checked my diary and not because it is any different to yesterday, when I had two work meetings on what was apparently a Sunday. People keep asking me how long we’ve been in lockdown now in Melbourne and the answer is truthfully, I...
What’s Worse: the Pandemic or the Politics?
During this pandemic, my routine — and that of everyone in my city of Melbourne — looks something like this. Spend all morning waiting for the time of the Premier’s press conference to be announced. Wait for the press conference where today’s number of new cases is...
Good Habits I Want to Keep When the Nightmare of 2020 Is Finally Over
We are 10 days (ish? I lost count) into our second lockdown of 2020. That’s if you’re not counting the voluntary lockdown over the hellish summer when we were all confined to our homes because smoke made the air unfit to breathe. Remember when we thought the bushfires...
How Will Films Reference the Coronavirus?
How to Write a Hallmark Movie While the World Is Ending
Until I was commissioned to write a Hallmark movie, I had never actually seen one. My task involved watching dozens of them so I could figure out the formula (yes they really are the same film over and over) before sending off my first screenplay. But even though I...
Our Animal Shelter Laws Need to Change
Late last year, my partner and I fostered a beautiful greyhound who had been surrendered to the care of a large animal shelter in Melbourne. Dash had suffered trauma as a result of five years of exploitation by the greyhound racing industry. He came to us with anxiety...
Will a Pandemic Make Us Realise How Privileged We Are?
I think we can all agree that it has been an exhausting week. And month. And year. Australia was only just beginning to recover slowly from the horror show of the worst bushfire season in history, when we — as everywhere else — were struck with a global pandemic. It...
Why Do I Care So Much About the Death of One Animal?
It’s been an emotionally fraught fortnight, for women in particular — torn between the conviction of Harvey Weinstein (and the potential precedent this sets for other powerful sexual predators), the sentencing of the killer of Grace Millane, a young British backpacker...
My First Foster Dog Experience Ended in Heartbreak
Up until a couple of months ago, I would not have considered myself a dog person. But my partner had been talking about fostering for a while and he is allergic to cats. So we decided on the closest thing to a cat that is actually a dog: a greyhound. As far as dogs...
I Don’t Want to Have Kids Because of Climate Change – Stop Telling Me This Is Stupid
- These days, every time I open the news, there is reporting of yet another way in which the world is headed towards catastrophe. In the last week alone, we’ve seen bushfires in Australia, floods in Indonesia, record-breaking high temperatures, and accelerated warming...
In Australia, It’s Impossible to Think About Anything Except the Bushfires
I woke up in Melbourne this morning, not just to the smell of smoke — I’m used to that — but the unmistakable odour of burning. It was so strong that I actually checked my partner hadn’t left the stove on, before I realised that it was coming through our closed doors...
Australia Is On Fire — Where Is Any Sign of Leadership?
A couple of days ago, my sister sent a message to the family Facebook chat — their area in the Blue Mountains was declared “too late to leave” as the roads out were closed off. She had already evacuated her two kids to my Mum’s house in Sydney and driven back to...
In Times Like These, Are We Right to Care About the Arts?
This week, the Australian Government declared that the arts were no longer important. No, that’s not actually true. They didn’t make any such declaration. Instead Prime Minister Scott Morrison spouted some nonsense about why he was cutting a number of government...
Can We All Finally Acknowledge How Ridiculous the Monarchy Is?
What is the actual point of the monarchy? I’m not British so I can’t pretend to understand the feeling of stability that having the same ruler for almost 70 years brings — but she is the Queen of Australia too so you’d think we would have figured out why by now. The...
Performing Virginity Checks on Women Is Nothing Short of Abuse
Full disclosure: until two days ago, I had never heard of a person (rapper?) called T.I. And now, thanks to Twitter, I know just one thing about him — that for the past few years, he has taken his 18 year old daughter to the doctor every birthday to check that her...
Kindness Is Not Always the Best Response
One of the unfortunate side effects of the Trump presidency is that it has made people forget the awfulness of other world leaders, both past and present. The bar of our expectations has now been set so low, that everyone who isn’t Donald Trump sails over it —...