The horizon is one of the perceptual fault-lines that runs between white and Aboriginal ways of understanding country. There’s an assumption amongst white observers of traditional Aboriginal painting that the horizon is absent. But it is omnipresent, hovering in the space around the paintings. If you sit beside the painters while they work, you...

Basically a privileged person is somebody who in fact doesn’t have or doesn’t need community because they can meet all of their needs with money. Because if you have enough money in modern society, you don’t need anybody or anyone or anything. You don’t need the people around you because you can pay somebody...

“My blood”, writes Stan Grant, who has both Irish and Wiradjuri forebears, in ‘Talking to My Country’, “the blood of Moyne and Belabula. White and black: two worlds that even within me, bend to each other but still can’t quite touch”. / And is that not us too? – two worlds, bending, but never...

The Seven Sisters Songline is a tale of tragedy and comedy, obsession and trickery, desire and loss, solidarity and sorrow that touches on life’s moral dimensions: how to live with each other on this earth in a sustainable way; how to care for each other and share resources equitably. It also instructs on gender...

Gratitude and reciprocity are the currency of a gift economy, and they have the remarkable property of multiplying with every exchange, their energy concentrating as they pass from hand to hand, a truly renewable resource. I accept the gift from the bush and then spread that gift with a dish of berries to my...

Learning is unnerving…It knows certainty to be an unrepentant and possibly temporary lapse in judgement//…Certainty, you could say, is the rent that knowledge pays for all the inner real estate it takes up. Learning, and the wonder that animates it, brings that rent down to something livable. The programmes of certainty are an assault...

For the Homeric Greeks, ‘kleos’, fame, was made of song. Vibrations in the air contained the measure and memory of a person’s life. To listen was therefore to learn what endures. I turned my ear to the trees, seeking ecological ‘kleos’. I found no heroes, no individual around whom history pivots. Instead, living memories...

Kintsugi serves as a powerful and dramatic metaphor of acceptance, resilience and renewal in a time of environmental, political and civil upheaval. Having kintsugi in our lives  encourages us to remember that we can get through more than we may feel we are able to, in what sometimes feels like a world of overwhelming...