(for Robert Frost) There’s something about a hole. How the […]

Gary Foley, the sixty-one year old, enters to great enthusiasm and applause. There is nothing at the Melbourne Festival that is not loud leftwing and multicultural. So inclusive, it has all become exclusive.

How then should we approach a professor of history, a documentary producer and a taxpayer funded television station who, in the SBS television series Immigration Nation, wove together a sackcloth of half truths, conspiracy theories and lies in a serious attempt at racial vilification.

We should sell Christmas Island. Resettle its entire population on the mainland and place the island up for auction to the highest bidder. The refugee camp and township should be mothballed carefully so as to be in good working order for the future owners.

They all meet at the corner of Napier and Gertrude. The shouting man, the keening woman, the transexual prostitute, and the woman in the pink dressing gown.

I have found myself in the company of Stephanie Dowrick, Rainer Maria Rilke, Dante, Diana Georgeff’s excellent biography of the late Shelton Lea, Melbourne’s much loved bohemian poet, and an eclectic and unique mix of Australia’s very best contemporary poets.

Yesterday I overheard a discussion about immigration between two middle-aged […]

Anzac Day is a day which lends itself to poetry and prosodic thought. It brings not the romance of war but the reality of death.

This impasse in school and education in Wadeye does not exist because there has not been enough taxpayer’s money thrown at it. It exists as a statement of welfare inertia, a statement of utter confusion, a statement of being ‘past caring’, a cry from an exhausted community, as a failed experiment at a tribal communist state.