The Nambucca Papers

When Mark Fisher popularised Fredric Jameson’s aphorism that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism[1] he alerted us to an important principle. We don’t engage with the world directly. We meet it through culture. There are boundaries to imagination,

The road to Yapa weaves through clumped grasses in red sand woodland to the foot of a low, rocky ridge. Where the road ends, a path climbs out of mulga and eucalypt onto sandstone outcrops dotted with white cypress pine. You can camp by the river an hour away and

“It’s a sick society.” You’ve probably heard it said. You may have said it yourself. It’s one way of expressing disgust at the worst of human behaviour. But what if it’s true? I grew up in circumstances unique in all of Earth’s long existence. The

The trick to perpetuating injustice, as any skilled propagandist can tell you, is to make what is entirely arbitrary seem natural and inevitable. The politics of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and its ‘economy’ of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ derive legitimacy from the notion that life is innately competitive. According to this view,

In the early 2000s a retiring senior executive from a prestigious German car company predicted our definition of luxury was about to change. Grandeur and excess would be superseded in the new century by fresh air, clean water, space, time, and silence. It was a surprisingly ascetical forecast, especially coming

Dr Stephen Porges, originator of Polyvagal Theory[1], noted that Covid-19 exposed how individual physiological states intersect with the health of whole societies. Mammals including humans are normally highly social but revert to a more primitive, reptilian state when threatened. This is the famous ‘fight or flight’ response. But in

On a panel show one night, a small gathering of notables discussed a topic which had been appearing in the news. Every comment was well-intentioned. But something about the discussion troubled me: the panel members were all white and used the terms ‘we’ and ‘us’ for themselves and their presumed

The image called Earthrise was taken from lunar orbit on Christmas Eve 1968. Earth’s swirling blue and white orb, resplendent in an ink-black sky, hovers above the barren, pock-marked surface of its Moon. I first saw it as a boy of ten. Its message to me remains as fresh