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A few weeks back, the lovely folks over at ABC’s Radio National had me on Drive to chat about my favourite internet ephemera (clue: it involves books and slightly tasteless party food). You can listen to the show here. 

Thrilled to be on a panel on cultural appropriation alongside stellar writers Celeste Liddle, Kamna Muddagouni and Reiko Okazaki as part of Protest and Persist, an incredible one-day event curated by Right Now’s Sonia Nair at the Melbourne Writer’s Festival next week. If you’re from Melbourne, come! It’s on at 11:45 at ACMI on August 27th and is completely free.

If you’ve ever needed proof that your dream mentor might fall short of your expectations, it’s hard to go past The Devil Wears Prada. In the cult 2006 comedy, Andy Sachs, a wide-eyed aspiring journalist played by Anne Hathaway, lands a job assisting Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly, a queenly fashion magazine editor whose stamp of approval could catapult her career. Surprisingly, it’s her colleague, an art director with a talent for no-nonsense pep talks, who prepares her for reality and gives her the courage to make her mark.

It only took a year in the corporate world to realise that climbing a traditional work ladder (power suits, inane meetings, networking drinks) was never going to be for me. But at the same time, I’ve always been fascinated with the ways in which freelancers and business owners replicate or reinvent the dynamics of traditional workplaces. I wrote about how freelance workers and creative professionals are increasingly mentored by their friends and collaborators rather than old-school bosses in a feature for The Collective. You can read it in full here. The issue  out at good newsagents around the country now.

 

We’re at Buttenshaw Park, a nondescript reserve off the Great Western Highway in Sydney’s Lower Blue Mountains where the group hold combat training sessions every Saturday. Around us, long-haired children gather twigs and women sit on sheepskins, knitting with needles made from animal bones. Men in chainmail fight each other with swords and circular shields. There’s some kind of high-pitched music, which sounds to me somewhere between an angry sparrow and a church organ. I later find out it’s coming from Close, who’s taught himself to play a Medieval stringed instrument called a hurdy-gurdy.

• When I heard about a community in the Blue Mountains with a decades-long passion for recreating life as Vikings there was only one action that felt plausible  — writing about it. So I did  in a feature for VICE that reminded me how much I love reportage (and how rarely the pressures of full-time freelancing allow writers the time and resources to pursue this kind of journalism). You can read the whole thing here.  

The latest issue of VAULT, featuring an incredible work by the Australian artist Christian Thompson on the cover,  fiction in response to the California photographer Larry Sultan’s seminal photo series Pictures From Home,  interviews with Diena Georgetti, Kaari Upson and Sanne Mestrom and a profile on the Pritzker-winning architect Shigeru Ban is out! At good newsagents and bookstores around the country now.

Image credit: Michelle Grace Hunder

If you’re Australian, you’ll know that the country will soon be faced with a postal plebiscite on same-sex marriage. A couple of months back, was such an honour to extensively interview millennial families who are rejecting heteronormative trappings while starting families of their own as part of a longform feature for Junkee, in partnership with Mercedes-Benz. You can read it here. 

Tokyo ranks as one of my all-time favourite cities. Sure, it’s easy to be blown away Lost In Translation-style by the neon, the micro-cultures, the density of bars, cafes and restaurants. But for me, the attention to detail and devotion to the smallest tasks that makes it one of the most compelling places in the world. I’m thrilled to have a feature on the on the influx of Australian chefs setting up restaurants in Tokyo in the current, July issue of Gourmet Traveller magazine. You can pick up the issue at good newsagents around the country now.

If you’re Australian, you’re probably familiar with Linda Jackson — the artist and fashion designer who, together with best friend Jenny Kee, helped dissolve the notion of Australia as a cultural backwater via outfits that spoke to the psychedelic shapes and dazzling shades of the bush. I grew up reading about her (and about a glittery, permissive Sydney, a world away from the city’s current reality) so it was a pleasure to meet and interview her about her life and art for the cover of new magazine Broad. You can read my profile  here. 

Sure, it sounds absurd — until you remember that we live in a culture in which a Texas judge recently referred to pregnant women as “hosts”, abortion is still a criminal offence in Queensland and New South Wales, and the Australian Christian Lobby is fighting to reinstate the global gag rule which denies women from Pacific Island nations rights to reproductive health services and abortion access.

The Handmaid’s Tale takes the culture’s motherhood fetish to its chilling endpoint and reminds us that we need to fight for autonomy over our lives and bodies at every turn.

• I wrote about the evergreen relevance of The Handmaid’s Tale for Daily Life. 

Was a pleasure to speak about writing and pitching meaningful thinkpieces and cultural criticism at the Emerging Writers Festival x Macquarie University event Between the Covers last week. The lovely folks at EWF interviewed me before the event — you can read it in full here.