The woman holds up her hand to stop him speaking, with one finger pushes her black-framed glasses back into place, continues tapping keys in a large face calculator. The tiny baby in the old pram sleeps. Will our children know the cost of it all?
Cresting the hill our breath suspends in unison. We are laughing, eye-spying. You, the one not driving, spy it first: a Jeff Koons puppy, backlit, riding a wave.
Official Australia has a history of trying to conquer and develop the north. That long and frequently violent struggle now seems to be reaching a new stage. We like to think that the devastation of one population and culture by another is all in the past, but the apparent failure of Rudd and Abbott to notice that northern Australia is shared country suggests that there might be more to come.
Around 20,000 people died in a series of violent conflicts between peoples extending across the entire continent and more than half of our history. We have yet to find a way to remember the loss of those people with anything like the scale and intensity of our other commemorations, such as Anzac Day.
Someone now cast in forgetfulness, out cold – dumped down in a sleeping bag moulded like a burial mound. And by their side neatly aligned, threads of an abandoned bedside.
You can't have your cake if it's eaten. Or your cooked goose if it's no good for a gander. Golden eggs are useless in a fragile economy. And what goes up must keep going.
Labor has used its rock star politician to push paper around. Peter Garrett was a hero to a lot of us. Get him out of that godawful suit and let him speak — sing, if he has to! — his mind on every issue that made him the most outspoken rock singer this country has seen.
Australian poet Tasha Sudan just won the Blake Prize for Religious Poetry, and in October will be ordained in a Zen Buddhist monastery. In simple but evocative language the poem speaks of the Buddha from his son's point of view.
extracted .. from a small black bag .. on a peak hour train .. Held sharp and confident as a new razor .. against the shunt and shuck .. of the carriage .. Throwback to industrial tortures .. held against the soft wet eye
A cracked grey angel .. shadows a snatch of brown weeds .. in a Coke bottle. .. A marble stone reads: .. 'our loving son, died too young' .. he sleeps, snug in clay.
What a pity gay Christians, who might so greatly enrich and evolve our religious institutions if permitted to flourish, are still obliged to eke their way along the shadowy paths of discretion if they want to be part of God's gang.
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