An ambivalent spectre hangs over the Australian landscape. It is a beautiful land, famous for its scale and dryness. But there is a special discomfort wherever white people tread. They do not altogether belong. Australia is a vast land, sparsely inhabited and relatively undifferentiated for thousands of hectares at a stretch. Before the European invasion, it must have been a dry but vibrant garden, each corner of which was known and accorded religious meaning by the Indigenous people.… Continued

Children have become a tabula rasa onto which the triumphs and failures of society are inscribed. When great projects are undertaken, the ostensible motivation is to make the world better for the next generation; when cracks appear in social systems supposedly established to facilitate better living, it is children who tend to fall through them. When things go terribly wrong for a child, his or her plight stands as a form of reckoning, not just for the individuals directly involved, but somehow for society as a whole.… Continued

On a small lake under a small wooden bridge in Merry Creek in Melbourne, where for a decade I have taken a walk early in the morning, there was a white goose. It was the only white bird among a group of brown and grey ducks, which shared that particular environment. The white goose had a broken wing, and a single feather stuck out conspicuously.… Continued