A few years ago, a human neighbour picked me a handful of beans from her garden. She lived not far up the road from where I am writing this. It was a warm day and my first visit to her home. Her …
Heterotopia, Radical Imagination, and Shattering Orders, edited by Paula Acari, Routledge.
dad nods and we stop laughing
mum’s big story verified
no clouds up the hill new moon
this is Djargurd Wurrung land
bright like a lightbulb due north
next Sunday lunch what is that
window reflection but wait
.
Cordite 4 February. Image detail of cover by Henry Lai-Pyne
This chapter is part of an ongoing study of snake–human relations that is reorienting me from the harms of ophidiophobia. All through my childhood I was terrified of snakes. This culturally inherited fright led me to lead others to snake killings.
The Routledge Companion to Gender and Animals, edited by Chloe Taylor, Routledge.
They ordered her, this stiff pink corpse
Bare as a glare and way too heavy to lift.
I would say the bath is a coffin
Enamelled sepulchre
She might leave a dint in it.
The floral sheet is loose, her flesh is …
Literary Veganism 1 March 2024
Snake Church is a home-grown kookaburra-led cultural experiment. My scattered field notes, moments-in-time reports, begin with the first movements of spring, when the lush grass of unmown areas swallows my feet, then my knees. Snake Church finishes, for this paper at least …
Spring, well over a decade ago. I head up the rise before the fruit trees as a tiger snake moves across the path made by my regular round of the tree paddock, a cherished place transformed more than ten years before this …
So, you are ready to co-exist with a snake. At last! No more niggling discomfort with those images of a snake under the foot of a woman under the hand of a man-god. Instead, you are helping make the oppression of others …
This essay offers an evisceration of my troubled links to ‘cattle country’, seeking a truth-telling that responds to my mother’s romancing. I trace my family’s part in the cattle industry imposed upon Jiman Country and Wulli Wulli Country, drawing on stories populated …
This work is a case of a worlding with every wording, where material textuality creates a poetic space for thick description that helps me see the world as textual material. A thing, the blue case, with a bare handle on itself, offers…
Farming must fundamentally change over the next ten years, if humans are to flourish for future generations. Our species, like most other species in this world, thrive with nourishing food, fresh air and unpolluted water. For many decades, intensive farming has been …
