A platypus trawls the river bottom. Its bill sweeps back and forth in the silt, raising a murky cloud that conceals all within. The platypus cannot see the mayfly nymph, at least, not with its eyes. It continues, shaking its head side to side as its bill disturbs the sediment, and as it does a map begins to build inside its mind, a diagram of inanimate objects and of the life between them. Each flex of a mayfly muscle, each flutter of electricity it emits, finds its way to the electroreceptors arranged in rows from the tip of the platypus’s bill to its bridge. A sixth sense that makes the platypus an extremely efficient hunter.

Platypuses can detect electrical currents as low as 20 microvolts per centimetre. A microvolt is one millionth of a volt. Miniscule when you consider a watch battery is 1.5 volts. A typical Australian household power point, 230 volts.

There are usually three points to a power outlet. Two like droopy eyes and a third falling open like the mouth of Edvard Munch’s ‘Scream’. Electricity travels to the power outlet via the live wire, usually the top right socket on the point. An appliance, plugged in, receives this current, allows it to course through the appliance and then out on a neutral wire on the top left. We control this electricity within a circuit. Even so, not all the current may complete its loop via the neutral wire we provide. Small electrical charges may escape, transfer to you via an electric shock, or burst from your appliance with exploding force. So, we find these adventurous currents another way out. We give them a path to the earth, quite literally, a wire that connects our appliances to the dirt.

Here, in the earth, electrical charges neutralise and spread throughout the great conductive mass of the planet. But the story doesn’t end here. The earth is part of one great global electric circuit, where imbalances spectacularly resolve in thunderstorms and lightning strikes. The atmosphere constantly nurses an electric field. We live our lives among it.

My daughters, jumping on the trampoline, laugh as their hair stands on end. Bouncing, their skin rubs against the air while the soles of their feet knead at the spring mat. Electrons transfer to their bodies and are held captive, unable to discharge into the insulating rubber of the trampoline.

I walk toward them, the rubber soles of my shoes creating friction with the ground, but the voltage within me is weaker than theirs—it wants to equalise—and as I reach to lift my youngest, an electric shock surges between us causing us to startle, then laugh.

We walk down to the veggie garden. It is autumn—harvest season. We pick the dead sunflowers for their seeds, pull out the tomatoes, plant brassicas and garlic. We dig our hands deep into the dirt and feel a release. A balance; the energies of our bodies once again neutral with the earth. Scientific studies show a significant reduction in the voltage inside our bodies when in contact with the earth. Some believe this state may reduce inflammation. While the verdict is out, it’s interesting to reflect on the fact that our species once lived in constant contact with the earth, maintaining a continual state of electrical equilibrium. These days we move within synthetic materials, sit inside buildings, and speed along roads in rubber-tyred cars. Perhaps, it’s because of this disconnect that we feel such immense relief when we walk barefoot on the grass, submerge ourselves in the ocean, or hug a tree. As hippyish as it may sound, we really do become one with the earth when we’re grounded.

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It is late evening when I raise my phone and see the photo of the man sitting side-on in a chair, shoulders hunched from a life spent toiling over a workbench with a tiny screwdriver and soldering iron. The figure is small in the scene, down low to the right, and while there is much happening in this photo, for a split second, my eyes see only the man; his posture, his black jeans, black hoodie and black sneakers. He is staring at something off to the left of the shot.

A single thump of my heart breaks against my ribs. My father is here, alive. But where?

This shock sensation is fully formed, yet within that same split second my sense reminds me that my father is, indeed, dead. He is here, if but a haunting presence captured by my heart.

I am solemn now, breathing through a pain in my lower ribs as I trace my eyes around the moment. The photo was taken years ago. There I am in the background, also in black jeans and a hoodie, my first child just the slightest bulge in my belly. I’m doing something at a plastic fold-out table, the kind you find at community halls and markets. Perhaps I’m making a cup of tea. My husband is also standing at the table, his back to the camera. I don’t recall where that table came from. It wasn’t ours, but it is our house—at least, the skeletal structure of it. We’re there upon the bare yellow-tongue boards, beneath exposed ceiling joists and rafters, and within a frame that is open to the elements. It is autumn six years ago, almost to the day. And there is Dad, staring pensively at something in the garden. Staring in the manner that people with Alzheimer’s do. Once upon a past he would have been full of conversation; full to the brim, for he never knew how to end one. But there he sits, frozen in time, looking out, looking content.

Three years ago in mid-March, I’d sat with my father in the garden at a small nursing home as his blue eyes turned grey. He had stopped eating, but made an exception for a chocolate paddle pop—he’d always had a sweet tooth—and I had wondered how long he could survive on paddle pops alone.

The following night in the wee hours before dawn, I was awoken by a phone call. Wrapped in a dressing gown, I walked out into the darkness of the mountains and stood under the stars as they fell from the heavens. My father was gone.

I’m not a religious person. I don’t believe in the gods of religious texts, although I find them interesting. I have no set spirituality, though I do see a connectedness between all things. I tend to gravitate toward us being here for no apparent reason. Amid all the unknown, I can confidently say I have no certainty of anything, and I’m wary of anyone that does.

But I am haunted. I am haunted by a stream of uncanny coincidences—ordinary things that happen at the strangest times, like drifting off then waking up hours after Dad’s death to the song ‘Swing Low Sweet Chariot’ on the television, which has never happened before, or taking Mum to a café to mark Dad’s birthday and having the table next to us sing Happy Birthday at the precise moment the waitress placed two cakes in front of us. Or, the other day on the three-year anniversary of Dad’s passing, having a Mozart playlist I was listening to suddenly interrupted with a song by John Martyn called ‘Spencer The Rover’, a song Dad loved back in 1974 and which Mum played to him as we sat under the gingko tree in his final days. He smiled. There’s the time three-days after Dad’s death when I noticed an old café in Wangaratta called Muddy Waters. The café is named after the river, but throughout my life, Dad often recounted the time he saw the blues singer Muddy Waters at a basement bar in New York. It was a story he loved to tell because it was the night Bob Dylan peed next to him at the urinal. Bob, that particular night, was on the drums. I passed that café for seven straight years before noticing it. Dad and I had even eaten across from it. Yet, days after Dad’s death, it became glaringly obvious to me. It took me until last month to visit it. I sat out in the courtyard, ordered, and began flicking through literary journals, pausing reflectively when the story I was reading contained the words ‘muddy water’.

Music, as it is for many, was a big part of our lives and many of my memories of Dad are tied up with song. Since Dad’s passing, the music shows up at the oddest times, seemingly out of context. Some may call them synchronicities, others, hauntings. I enjoy them. They warm me with nostalgia and bring my father near. But I don’t believe my father is sending little messages through words and song, coordinating the timing and movements of others to match mine. Rather, I believe it’s my mind dressed in the white sheet.

I’ve been thinking about why such coincidences have surged since my father’s death and I’ve found a clue. It’s something a friend of mine who lost her father also noticed: I ‘see’ Dad everywhere. I double-take at almost any tall, lanky man in jeans and a Panama hat. Often, they look nothing like him, but there’s something in their movements, their clothes, their posture, that catches my eye. This doesn’t happen with other people in my life. I don’t walk around town thinking I see my mother or husband or close friends, all of whom are still with me. And I never mistakenly thought I saw Dad before his death. Only now, in the aftermath of loss does this occur, and it signals something to me about what my brain is doing.

Almost all of what we see and hear is not remembered by the brain.1 Millions of bits of information flow through the brain at any given second, even in our sleep, and our brains expertly filter this information down to a manageable fraction—often just three to five ‘chunks’ of information. It’s called Selective Attention and it focuses us on what is most necessary. Our brains purposefully forget the rest. The forgetting part is crucial because it creates space for the things that must be remembered.

What we focus on has a lot to do with our experiences, and the more we focus on a particular thing, the more likely we are to notice those things in our lives. This happens because the neurons that fire together when that thought process occurs strengthen the more they are used, making them more likely to be used again.

In essence, the name of the Muddy Water’s Café wasn’t as important to me while Dad was alive. I passed it for seven years, it fleeting through my mind and disappearing before I ever knew it had been there. But as neurons associated with memories of my father triggered more frequently after his death, the words took on a new weight that allowed them to pass through my selective attention and into my working memory.

There is so much around us that we fail to perceive unless it is brought to our attention, and these things are not necessarily small or inconsequential. I now see connections to my father everywhere, often appearing out of context, and I’m comforted by this string of strange coincidences. They are hauntings of sorts, but most likely hauntings born of my own mind. At least, that’s how I choose to explain it today. Like I said, who could ever truly be sure.

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The summer heatwave has lifted, but the world still burns. My thoughts go out to all with loved ones surviving bombs tonight. But let us take a short moment for distraction. Let us fall with the rain and run to the rivers…

Alia xx

Finally, the rain has come. First, the drops formed pools atop the sunbaked earth which, forged like a rock, had forgotten how to let it in. Hard, it hesitated. But sensing the celebratory ultrasounds of the trees and feeling the joy in the roots of the grass, it conceded and let the water soften its surface and spill into its cracks. Overwhelmed with remembrance, the ground soaked it in. Life was returning. The water knew the way, seeping down to where it stores damp and cool. There are rivers down there; aquifers that flow beneath the hills to underground lakes, but sometimes one springs to the surface of a paddock or forest, blushing reeds, before finding its way into a stream.

The rain has been gentle, giving the earth time to drink, but still, some drops run free, caressing the curves of the range until they reach the gullies that deliver them to the creeks. Barely two weeks ago, a creek at the back of town stopped flowing and, finding no need to walk further to the bridge, I walked right across its dry pebbly bottom for the first time, stepping between trapped pools and stagnant puddles. There were no galaxias or tadpoles, not a tinkle for the ear, just a disbelieving dragonfly patrolling the mud. The rivers and creeks run low in summer—it’s the natural way of things—though I’d never seen this creek run dry; it’s been the harshest summer in a long while.

Blissfully, the Autumnal rain has come to replenish the thirsty creek. Its waters now gurgle over rocks and down drops, babbling to the ducks as it skips to the river. The river swells, scaling its forgotten banks and remembering how to rush. It roars over the weir and bounces off the walls of the canyon. With it, washes away the anxiety of summer. The bushfires are doused. The garden, saved. We breathe deeper with this change of season and exhale the heatwave that outstayed its welcome.

It had been blisteringly hot. We had camped high in the mountains to escape it, the kids running free among the wildflowers and snow gums, then on a whim we descended into a valley we hadn’t ventured into in quite some time. As the thermostat struck 40°C, we stopped to swim in Snowy Creek, a tributary of the Mitta Mitta River, and waded into a gentle bend cloaked in ferns and lomandra. The water welcomed the light, which, finding its way to the riverbed, lit a thousand flecks of fools gold like tiny stars that twinkled between comets of tadpoles. This is what a summer daze feels like: cicadas singing, heat in your nostrils and the cold caress of an alpine stream against your skin.

By the time we reached our campsite 30km downstream on the Mitta Mitta itself, something was out of sorts. The river was wild, pummeling past our tent set high on the bank above. It’s mesmerising to stand before a river that can destroy you. And discombobulating when its rampage isn’t natural. There’d been no significant rain in months, we were in the midst of a prolonged heatwave, and bushfires were but a stone throw east of us. I forbade the children from stepping a foot near it. The Mitta Mitta was running in reverse.

The river I live besides meanders in the heat of summer then swells with the rain and snow. I’m so used to its natural flow that it’s easy to forget most of the world’s major rivers live life like a tap. About 60% have been captured, dammed, and controlled. The percentage is closer to 80% in the developed world. Most rivers no longer inundate the floodplains in winter. Rather, they are held captive until summer when they are released to irrigate the crops and orchards along their banks. This reversal benefits food production and reduces town flooding, but its ecological impacts are immense. River regulation has destroyed natural wetlands, fish breeding grounds and overall biodiversity, and prevents the free movement of fish and other aqua species up and down river systems. The natural way of things has been lost.

On the Mitta, we went to see this giant tap for ourselves. We scaled its 180-metre-high rock wall and looked out across the waters of Lake Dartmouth, cradled by mountains that disappeared into the smoke haze. It’s quite an engineering feat and standing on that dam wall, you can’t help but admire our tenacity, terrible as it may be. Towns need water, after all, but there’s no way a fish could ever travel upstream here.

Humans have meddled with our river systems so immensely that it’s hard to picture how they once were. It would be wrong to assume that the 40% deemed ‘unregulated’ are natural. Mine—the Ovens River—for instance, was once the most heavily dredged river in the Southern Hemisphere; it was dug up for miles and changed course a few times. Nature has done a fine job at reclaiming it, but still, we tamper. A small concrete weir in Bright prevents the Murray Cod from travelling beyond it, and downstream, there are dams on its tributaries.

Even something as innocent as livestock will forever change a riverbank, trampling its vegetation and causing erosion. Many farmland creeks now run like deep, bare channels, though early explorer accounts often described reedy streams that spilled across the earth. Such places are exceedingly rare, remnant only in places where few humans dare to go.

It’s easy to look at nature and believe it is indeed natural. It’s harder to pause and imagine how it might have been.

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I was naive to expect life to have settled by February. It hasn’t, it’s as full as ever, and this essay finds you a week later than usual because of it. But here it is. It has made it to you, hot spotting off what’s left of my phone data after my satellite internet died this morning from an unknown cause, but possibly the heatwave. In between words and school drop-offs, I’ve been running over the crunching grass to the garden to move the hose that, like an intravenous drip, does its best to keep alive the plants that have survived another week without rain. It’s the driest I’ve seen this alpine valley—it is kindling—but for now, the bushfires have gone around us. I hope all fares well in your part of the world. Let’s move beyond it though and onto this month’s essay on ‘want’. It’s a topic that piqued my interest amid the consumerism of Christmas and stayed with me as I began to observe its constant presence in our lives. Here are my thoughts. I’d love to hear yours. Enjoy!

Cheers,

Alia

I want to extend my house. I want to be able to open my bedroom door and walk around the bed without first having to close the door and squeeze inside like one of those tiny toilet cubicles in which the door attempts to touch the seat, forcing you to squish down the side of the loo to shut it. How do you get into those things?

Our two-bedroom house was fine before we added two kids to it and gave them our larger room to share. The switch served some practical purposes, one being the avoidance of child decapitation caused by a bunk bed/ceiling fan combination. I’m pleased to report the strategy is working and I’m prepared to continue squishing into my cubicle of a room to keep my children alive. But I do want to extend my house, get a larger bedroom, a wardrobe big enough for two people’s things. An office. Not so much ‘A Room of One’s Own’, as Virginia Woolf would advise—I’d feel a little selfish—but just a room with a door that closes when it needs to; a space for my computer and the books I don’t want torn.

I want these things with a side of guilt. They feel like such little luxuries. Truth be told, I don’t need them. We survive perfectly well with this roof over our heads. Needs and wants are very different beasts.

Down the road is a dilapidated cottage, likely dating back to the late 1800s. The whole cottage is about the size of my loungeroom, which is relatively modest. As recently as 30-odd years ago that little cottage was the home of Mrs Joyfeather, or Mayfeather or maybe I’ve remembered it completely wrong, but it was certainly a happy name that reminded me of the snow-capped Mount Feathertop to its south. Children in town would ride their bikes a 20km-round trip to her tiny cottage for a slice of cake. Whole families lived in such cottages and counted themselves lucky to have walls, a roof and a fireplace.

I have walls, a roof and a fireplace, and I want an office, with a big shelf of books and a window seat in which to read them. I would be the luckiest person in the world because I don’t need any of it, although working from home would certainly be more comfortable.

Lately, I’ve been observing wants. Trump wants Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal and world domination; my kids want every toy unicorn in existence. It’s fascinating to watch my three-year-old take but a fraction of a second to mimic the wants of her older sister, clinging to these morphing desires like her life depends on it. And in some ways, it does. Want is coded into our existence. It’s an evolutionary trait that sits at the core of human life. Without want, we cease to function. It drives us, teaches us, helps us to survive, learn, and remember what works. It gives us hope. Our brains evolved to be motivated, not satisfied.

The troublesome thing about want, particularly in this modern world, is that it has no off switch.

As sure as we breathe, we will want for something, and where those wants take us has everything to do with our place in the world, our culture, environment, and ultimately, want’s best friend: dopamine.

Some people want to rule the world, others want an office. Some want power, others want to be led.

All these wants diverge so significantly, but ultimately, we all want the same thing. We want for happiness, that blissful state of contentment, which ironically, will forever evade us amid all this wanting.

Can we truly be content with what we have when we’re destined to want?

Perhaps not entirely, but we grow closer toward contentment when our wants are simplified and more closely aligned with our basic needs. In short, wanting isn’t really the problem. The problem is our tendency to fall into the trap of believing that satisfaction is always found in the next thing we want. It’s a pattern of entrapment, and an easy one to fall into in a consumerist economy.

The only way to find contentment in a life of infinite wants is through awareness. We need to be fully conscious of our wants, examine them, and be aware of what triggers our dopamine. With consciousness, we have the option to turn our focus toward the simple things in our daily lives. If we can recognise the joy in those little moments—the sunrise, the first waft of coffee before it hits your lips, children laughing, a bird singing in the rain, homemade biscuits, bedtime stories—if we can see the joy in the things we already have, we’re less likely to rely on our wants to bring happiness. We can begin to find contentment.

Having said all that, I still want to extend the house. I’d also like world peace. I am human after all.

What do you want?

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Regards,

Alia

On a summer’s day in the skies above Bright, off the edge of Mystic Mountain and over the river, brightly coloured confetti-like strips ride the breeze; crescents of red and yellow and blue, floating, twisting, spiralling—dangling little bodies beneath on strings. Sometimes they plunge as if sucked into a whirlpool, then, as they draw terrifyingly close to the ground, rebound from an invisible springboard. Tiny heads and hands and legs high above the world, looking beyond our field of view to a horizon layered with ranges that curve out of sight. They can see Mount Kosciuszko from up there.

Mid-January is particularly spectacular—a sky full of sprinkles—100 little paragliders launched together for the National Championships. They ride the thermals up the valley, soaring two kilometres above the ground, and disappear over the hills. With nothing but the heat of the earth and a wing, they stay airborne for hours, traversing up to 100km. I find it frighteningly amazing that someone could trust their life to the wind, that they could suspend themselves above the world in an element they can’t see, an element intrinsically prone to erraticism.

I once turned down an offer to go tandem paragliding. I was curious, but busy. Thought I would go another day. And to be honest, I found the necessity of being strapped tightly to the front of a man, awkward. Oh, and I am probably the most motion-sick person you would ever meet in your life. I do well with my feet on the ground. Even so, I wanted to go, but I told him, no. Said some other time, then garbled some words about how it freaked me out that I couldn’t see what the air was getting up to. He cocked his head to the side and said somewhat cryptically, ‘Yeah, but there are ways,’ and left it at that.

What ways? I wondered. How do you see the invisible? Why aren’t you falling out of the sky all over the place? I was more curious than ever.

There are a lot of paragliders in my area. It comes with the territory. So, while chatting to one recently, I asked him what it was he loved so much about flying and his answer gave me mine. What a fool I had been. Of course there are ways. All I had to do was open my eyes.

He began with the expected cliché—that it was a mental release from life—then paused and thought some more. What he loved most was the problem solving. The aerology. Now I was interested.

“You’re interpreting things you can’t see,” he said. Then he told me about the motion of the trees in the wind, the shape of the ripples as the wind skims the surface of a lake, the movement of the clouds in an updraft, the rise of an eagle; things I marvel at most days of my life. The wind leaves evidence everywhere.

It takes up to 20 years to be able to interpret the atmosphere at a championship-winning level; 10-years to be remotely competitive and three to four years just to be able to complete the set task, he said.

Twenty years, I thought, delighted with how a sport could reveal such an explicit timeframe of how long it takes to understand, that it could provide its own dataset of hermeneutics, that philosophical exploration of understanding. Twenty years to be good at interpreting the wind, that marvellous invisible force.

How long does it take to know the unseen? An emotion? A thought? To interpret that through a smile, the speed at which someone turns their head. The look in their eyes. Their blink, or lack thereof. How long before we know the meaning behind the movement of a hand, the swell of the heat before a storm, the magpie’s stare, the space between bodies? How many years does it take to know when the harvest won’t come, to see the truth, to know a lie?

We understand the world through our own experiences, and that’s a crippling constraint. How do we know when we get it wrong? Unlike paragliding, we don’t exactly fall out of the sky.

The German philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) said:

“Misunderstanding occurs as a matter of course, and so understanding must be willed and sought at every point.”

Schleiermacher believed that interpretation is holistic, that it comes in degrees, its angles, its shape, slowly building toward understanding.

Understanding takes time. It’s constant. And we travel alongside one another at our various mismatched stages, misunderstanding—misinterpreting—the other.

To improve our understanding, we must seek, we must experience, we must collate, we must break beyond our horizons. We must live. And in living, we spend our days interpreting the things that can’t be seen, anxiously or otherwise. It’s within these invisible spaces, these seeming voids, that life moves and evolves. It’s within these invisible spaces that we find creation.

How many years does it take to read a silence, a rhythm, a memory? How long before we know a history, a bias, a belief?

How long until we know peace when we’re yet to understand each other?

How long before we learn to trust the wind?

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I hope this finds you well. December is here and I’m certain my productivity is about to take a dive until February. It’s the escape time of year, and so this month’s essay is a little bit of that. A dose of nostalgia. It’s something that I love about modern literature, particularly modern Australian literature; its ability to evoke a sense of nostalgia. A shared connection with the characters. Things near forgotten that harbour the power to inject jolts of joy at their mere mentioning. And so, this month, let’s place one foot in the past and the other in the future. Enjoy!

Cheers,
Alia

Gramophones. I’ve never heard a gramophone. Seen them in museums and antique stores, watched them online, but I’ve never stood in a room and listened while one crackles and hums the Fox Trot. I’d like to do that, stand in a room while one plays. Such fascinating little contraptions that spin and sing without a volt of electricity. Gramophones are wound using a crank handle. Wound just like we used to wind car windows; like we still wind a Hills Hoist clothesline.

We wound the windows down like that the night my parents took us to the drive-in to see Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. Wound the windows down, reached out to the speakers hung from methodically placed white posts and pulled them in on their coily dial-telephone cords then hooked them over the window glass. Sometimes, you could tune the sound to the FM radio, if you had one, but it only worked half the time.

The crack of a choc-top between your teeth.

That particular drive-in closed not long after.

So gramophones. Even records—their electric descendants—were obsolete by the time I entered the world. Households still clung to their vinyl collections for a decade more, but it was all about cassette tapes in the 80s.

I remember my first Walkman. It was black with white lettering and clipped over a belt, or in my case, the waist of my jeans or on my pocket, but I mostly didn’t clip it to anything and listened to it lying on the top bunk of the small room I shared with my sister. The Walkman was a birthday present from my parents; an actual Sony Walkman, not a cheap imitation like I’d expected if I was to get one at all. Being too young to work, my cassette collection was entirely recorded; songs stripped by holding a cassette recorder against Barry Bissell’s Take 40 Australia on my clock radio. I had one full album, a recorded copy of Paul Simon’s Graceland, which I’m sure my parents got from my uncle. Can’t say the other 8-year-olds of the day were into it, but given my limited choice I listened to it more times than I can remember.

I couldn’t type that sentence without stopping to stream it (it is 2025 after all), so it’s now the soundtrack to this story. The A Side starts with The Boy in the Bubble if you’d like to sing along.

These are the days of miracle and wonder
This is a long distance call
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo
The way we look to us all

I still have my dad’s old Super 8 camera, you know the ones popular in the 70s that recorded moving pictures onto film. We would wait until it was dark, set the projector up on the coffee table, lift the painting off the wall and squish onto the couch, watching the moving pictures flicker on the wall, a little picture hook in the middle, the tick of the projector, the flash of a red line at the end, the sound of the finished film flapping as it spun.

It was about then that they stopped delivering milk to our front doorstep. No more glass bottles with red or gold aluminium foils.

Do you remember, waterbeds were a thing back then?

By the time we were in high school waterbeds were out. In those years we would go up the street to Video Ezy where my best friend’s dad was the store manager and weave our way through shoulder-height walls of VHS tapes to the New Release section to see if the latest blockbuster was in. Often, there’d be a ‘Due Back Soon’ card slipped in the plastic cover, sending us off into the forgotten aisles to stare at films we’d already seen while eying other lurkers suspiciously.

5-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks that were actually floppy
3-and-a-half-inch disks that weren’t
CDs
DVDs
iPods
Beepers
Reverse charge calls
Fags—those little white musk stick lollies with red tips at one end so kids could look like we were smoking. We used to get them in little rectangular boxes at the swimming pool.

My friends and I would go to the cinema a lot when I was a teen. Even into my 20s. Sometimes, we’d drive to Castle Hill and buy tickets from a blonde girl who would shoot us killer deadpan sarcasm through the hole in the pane of the box office window. She’s the only ticket seller I can remember. A Hollywood star now. I guess there’s a reason some people become famous.

But that was half a lifetime ago. It’s been years since I’ve been to the cinema. I, like many, watch most films at home these days. And I’ve got this urgent feeling that I need to go, that I need to take my children now so that they can look back when they’re my age and remember what it felt like; so they know the dramatic sensation of the lights, the surround sound and the darkness, so they remember the bubble-gum pocked carpet and stained seats, the popcorn, the cacklers and coughers and talkers and chip-packet rustlers. So they can feel the texture of the moment, the choc-top crunch between their teeth.

It’s a somewhat irrational overreaction. Cinemas may be closing, but they won’t all disappear overnight; the decline will take years and there will always be those that survive on niche or novelty alone. Plus, kids need somewhere to go without their parents. But my itch to go is a recognition rearing up from the depths of my consciousness that cinemas are a thing of the past. Like the ping of dial-up internet or the annual ‘surprise’ of finding the Yellow Pages on your doorstep, the tables have turned. Films, I’m sure, will remain. We are the storytelling species after all. But from here they’ll largely be made for streaming, and then… well, who knows what innovation will come next.

The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in a corner of the sky
These are the days of miracle and wonder
And don’t cry, baby, don’t cry, don’t cry

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That’s it from me for 2025. Thank you for your support over the past year—I truly appreciate it. I wish you all a wonderful festive season and I’ll see you back here bright and bubbly in the New Year.

Thank you for Mind Flexing with me. If you enjoyed this essay, please subscribe on Substack or your favourite podcast app, comment, click the ❤️ button, or share it with someone who would appreciate it. I’ll be back in a month. Until then, keep 💪

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This month, something a little different, some autofiction from a time when I was in New Zealand about 10 years ago. It’s a little story that looks at a scenario in which I didn’t realise what was happening until after the fact, and it’s something that shows that in life we often don’t understand what is unfolding right before our eyes. Enjoy!

Regards,

Alia

It is noon on the grey coast of New Zealand’s Northland, a high tide of grey water under a grey sky and golden grey sand. Sticks, twisted black and broken, spear from beneath windblown bushes, stab the sand and cluster by the driftwood, bleached and beached. At the edges, barnacled black rocks stand steadfast in the waves, agitating the waters with their refusal to move, not an inch, not today, and not tomorrow. The breeze floats gently having failed to wake fully this day, sleepwalking through the grey-green grasses, over mounds and crabholes, mollycoddling the clouds and rippling the sea’s surface, which spills over the sand, popping bubbles, then shyly pulls away. There is an ant by the coastal brush.

The breeze sleepwalks over the knees and across the face of a woman lying on the sand, wisping strands of dark hair over her nose from ear to ear. She pulls the hair from her eyes and raises a book into the breeze, pages open, head planted in the sand staring up to a sky full of words. Rustling the pages, the breeze muzzles all else but the hush of the leaves and the sea; they are indistinguishable, punctuated on occasion by the caw of a gull. From down a sand-blown track that cuts through the thigh-deep green, a man and a woman come, stepping over sticks and on cockles, stepping over the ant, and walking a short way along the curvature of the bay, past the woman with the book to a decaying driftwood log on the edge of the dunes. They sit and pull sandwiches from a bag, ham and cheese and iceberg lettuce.

Staring out at the bay, they watch as eight long fins, shiny and black, rise from beneath the water. The fins rise tall in the grey water or the grey sky, one cannot tell, and slowly move in close to the beach, snug against the sand. They are so close they can almost touch the toes of the woman with the book. They huddle in the grey sky water that blankets all that lies beneath; bodiless fins, shiny and black reaching skyward and arching back like samurai swords that slice the scene. The woman stares up at her words and turns a page. It is a very good book.

Out on the boundary of the bay, between the headlands of barnacled black rocks, a single fin patrols back and forth, back and forth. The couple eating sandwiches watch it; they watch the huddling fins, bobbing up and down in the water like boats in the breeze. The fins are so peaceful that the woman with the sandwich says you could step barely two metres into the sea, water up to one’s hips, and just touch them, slip your hands over their blubbery bodies and down their backs, but she wouldn’t dare because she’s heard the old whaler tales from Eden and doesn’t trust orcas. She doesn’t trust humans either. She bites into her sandwich and hears the lettuce crunch between her teeth.

The fins are in a circle now, convening. The couple with the sandwiches watch, curious as to what they are doing on the shore. They watch the woman with the book and wonder if they should tell her she has orcas at her toes. She is staring up at her words and not at her toes as she turns another page of her very good book.

In the distance, the fin patrolling the bay has come closer but keeps well out. The fins on the beach drift and dip below the blanket of water, a little deeper now. From the east, a mother and daughter walk a small dog along the bay. They walk in the wake of the gentle grey wash and its foamy white spill, deep in conversation, and pass between the whales and the woman’s toes. The little dog bounces ahead. They don’t see the orcas. They are having a very important conversation.

How did they not see the orcas? thinks the woman with the sandwich. Perhaps they did. Perhaps they don’t care. Perhaps it’s a common sight. We are not from here, after all, she tells herself. Perhaps there is nothing remarkable about orcas on a beach in New Zealand, and she takes another bite of her sandwich while her eyes roam over the driftwood and around the bay toward the black barnacled rocks. Perhaps I am overwhelmed, and she recounts to her husband the time by the Saint Lawrence in Québec when they stopped the night at a hikers’ cabin in Forillon with its timber bunks and stove fireplace, and sat the evening out on the deck by the river. They had the world to themselves, a world of silver and shadow, of shimmering light, of silence, or so they thought, until they were started by the sound of a giant blowing its nose, a great propulsion, and there it was again, and along the shimmering river beneath them came a pod of minke whales skirting the riverbank with their flippers.

Perhaps it is a common sight.

Now, in their polar-fleece jackets, zipped to their chins, under mouths munching iceberg lettuce, devouring ham and bakery bread, they watch the mother and daughter with the small dog disappear along the beach. The woman with the book moves and they watch her too. She closes the very good book, stretches and rolls onto her hands and knees, her back to the salted sea, and dusting the sand, stands to leave. The fins dip deeper into the Davey deep.

Perhaps it’s not remarkable, the couple say as they finish their sandwiches and scatter the crumbs to the seagulls and sea snails, sea urchins and sailors. The samurai fin patrolling the bay has disappeared and the tips of the others are drifting in the grey day. Grains of sand blow over the couple’s shoes and into their shipwrecked socks as, standing to leave, they look to the sea once more and wonder if they saw anything at all. They walk back along the dunes to the sandy track, stepping over the sticks and on the cockles, and are gone.

The beach is deserted now save for the tips of fins barely discernible above the blanket. Beneath the surface, the orcas had come in close, huddling, nuzzling. They had moved gently, fawning over the newborn which, just a sandwich before, had quietly slipped tail first into the world and onto the sand of the sheltered bay. With their noses, the orcas had raised it up to draw from the surface its first breath, forming a circle of protection as it moved its flippers for the first time in the washing warm waters. Then, cradling their new life, their babe, their little love, they drifted gently, rocking into a world that is every bit grey and every bit remarkable, salt seasoned and shimmering. On the beach, the waves crashed into the barnacled black rocks and the breeze kicked sand along the shore. The ant was nowhere to be seen.

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Thank you for Mind Flexing with me. If you enjoyed this essay, please subscribe on Substack or your favourite podcast app, comment, click the ❤️ button, or share it with someone who would appreciate it. I’ll be back in a month. Until then, keep 💪

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I hope this finds you well. This month, I look at the controversy surrounding a word that many of you will have become quite familiar with, and I highlight two of the countless ways that word is coming to fruition. I look forward to your thoughts.

Regards,

Alia

The water trickles from the taps for just a few hours a day, the pressure, so low, it won’t reach the top floor apartments. Electricity fizzles out for hours at a time. Residents religiously fill plastic bottles and containers. Civil servants have been told to stay home and on days of suffocating air pollution, schools have been shut. It’s been hot; this past summer temperatures regularly reached 40°C and the cooler air of October has been welcome. Still, the rain won’t come and five years of drought and entrenched bureaucratic mismanagement have left the region’s four major dams at 9% capacity. The ground subsides as water is sucked from below the surface to find its way to the lips of 19 million people and an industry with an unquenchable thirst. The wetlands are dying.

Nineteen-million people—the population of Iran’s Tehran Province, which sprawls out from the nation’s capital Tehran in the shadows of the imposing Alborz Mountains. The mountains, gold dry and starkly beautiful are snowcapped in winter, but they excel in capturing rain and sending it northward, away from the city. Millions more in surrounding regions, too, are affected. This past year has seen just 142 mm of rain in Tehran, less than I just tipped from my rain gauge here in the alpine valleys of Victoria after just three weeks collection.

The Iranian water crisis is so severe that President Masoud Pezeshkian has said there is no choice but to move the capital more than 1,000km to the south, establishing a smarter, planned city on the shores of the Persian Gulf, across the way from Dubai, Abu Dahbi and Doha. Previous presidents, too, have tried; the capital’s fall has been a long time coming. But such drastic change has its opponents, and now, as the capital ceases to effectively function, the people watch for signs of what Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei will ultimately decide.

History is littered with the remains of ancient cities abandoned when climatic patterns shifted: Angkor (Cambodia), Mesa Verde (United States), Tikal (Mexico), Çatalhöyük (Turkey), Ur (Iraq), each once grand and lively. The earth is in a constant state of change. Seas become coastlines become forests become deserts become seas. It’s the natural way of things. And yet, what is happening now is not entirely natural. Inevitable, yes, eventually; but not for this moment in time—humans have hit the accelerator, sped off on a joy ride as if completely oblivious to the speed limit that exists to maintain order.

This moment—now—is what we call the Anthropocene; the era of human-induced climate change. Although it’s all rather unofficial, at least where epochs are concerned. In fact, the term has unleashed a bit of geological drama. The International Commission on Stratigraphy—the peak body that defines our geological time scales—is not convinced.

I find it amusing that I had to look up what epoch we’re currently in. I’ve never described myself as existing withing the Holocene, that geological phase in time that began at the end of the last ice age around 11,700 years ago. And yet, in recent years I’ve become very aware of life having shifted into the Anthropocene. It’s somewhat of a pop culture buzzword.

It makes sense that we would want to define the profound climatic shift we have inflicted upon ourselves. Anthropocene is catchy. Derived from the Greek, ánthropos, meaning ‘human’ and -cene from kainós, meaning ‘new’, its use is only set to grow as more cities like Tehran succumb to their own ill-conceived environmental practices, causing them to crumble under the pressure of our changing environment. Already, the world’s most vulnerable are being displaced by our global mismanagement. Rising sea levels are causing low-lying island nations, like Tuvalu in Polynesia, to depopulate. In June this year, one third of the nation’s 10,000 residents applied to immigrate to Australia under a new climate change visa, although capped at 280 people per year, the process will be slow. One by one, Tuvalu’s people will set sail in the rising tide, until one day it will cease to exist. At what point does a nation die?

Globally, we have failed to bring emissions down to levels that will restrain rising air and sea temperatures. We are warming quickly now. This is the Anthropocene, and yet, it is not.

Last year, a panel of geologists from the International Commission on Stratigraphy voted against a proposal by the Anthropocene Working Group to end the Holocene and mark the beginning of a new epoch. None on the panel disputed the impact of humans on climate, but given epochs are time scales identified by geological characteristics that occur over millions of years, the time frame of the Anthropocene (and the Holocene, too, for that matter), would be unusually short. Moreover, epochs are divided into ages, and sitting within the Holocene is the Meghalayan Age, a time of relatively stable climate and human-driven environmental change, like farming and industry. Arguably, it would be more appropriate for the Anthropocene to succeed this age rather than mark the start of a new geological epoch, especially given we continue to live within the interglacial conditions characteristic of the Holocene.

Unfortunately, the suffix -cene is used only for epochs, meaning the Anthropocene would need a new name, not ideal given its acceptance into our lexicon. Perhaps Anthroposaion (a combination of ánthropos and aion, meaning ‘age’, will sound close enough.

Formalities aside, the Anthropocene may not be a geological epoch, but it is nevertheless real. The world’s weather patterns are shifting, life and what sustains it is moving. Species that cannot move or adapt will perish, and we, having built our metropolises and food bowls based on the old, need to be flexible and unfixed. We need to create and embrace new ways of doing things. A great migration has begun. Tehran—one of the largest cities in Western Asia—is about to run out of water, and the rest of civilisation needs to be prepared to do more than just take note.

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It's said time is an illusion, a construct to help us navigate the static nature of the universe in which the past, present and future coexist. I feel this coexistence, yet I live within the dimension of time, the measurement we use to differentiate between the days that came before in which we didn't ache, in which the world was less built, and in which older generations were young and alive.

Within this dimension are the timeless pieces, like the Three Sisters in the Blue Mountains, part of the ancient Seven Sisters songline on Gundungurra Country, which is reflected in the Pleiades in the sky. We've just stopped by it now on our way west to Parkes and I feel every bit an eight year old staring at the same sandstone that has stayed in my blood. I can see the Snugglepot and Cuddlepie sticker mum and dad bought me from the gift shop as though it still exists. God I loved that sticker. There are rainbow lorikeets at the gift shop window. Mum unchanged, dad still here. This is what I feel, although my eyes see my own daughters leaning into the bars of the lookout, staring into the Jamison Valley, sucking on Caramello Koalas like they are quite possibly the finest thing to ever exist in this world.

When I return to Sydney, the people are comforting and familiar, unchanged and yet aged in a way that isn't static. Time is escaping us. If it be an illusion, life exists outside it. Time reaches forward, relentlessly, and I wonder how it is that physicists can now reflect it backwards, like a record turned in reverse, distorted and pitchy, maybe satanic.

I am no physicist. I cannot reflect time. The minutes surge by and I've not enough of them to get to where I'm going (which is somewhere very fulfilling). I can only rearrange the time within its construct, and so my dear friends, I find it necessary to reduce my time on Mind Flexing and send you these thought expeditions at the start of each month instead of fortnightly.

I want to thank you with the fullness of my heart for your company in this little online space. It is one thing to write, but another altogether to have an audience, and particularly one so engaging as yourselves. You are very much appreciated.

As I've written you now at the end of the month, I will post my next essay on October 9 and then move forward with essays on the first Thursday of each month.

Until then, use your time well. A x

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A short while later, it was back, picking out dried parsley strands from beneath the grevilia (my garden is, well, let’s be kind and call it interesting). It hopped onto the deck and strutted up to the cat lazing in the sun. Caspian was pleasantly amused because it’s rare his favourite species would be so brazen as to come within a paw’s reach. But he was cautious and careful not to undo his sprawl; he knows better than to mess with a magpie, and I should warn here for the non-Australians among us that it would be wrong to confuse the Australian magpie with the smaller northern-hemisphere birds of the same name. They are not closely related. Our magpies are both feared and adored, insanely intelligent, vicious and kind, and absolute bosses of their domain. The magpie stared at Caspian for a good moment then casually walked past his head and flew off to build its nest in the gum tree.

Dear Caspian. If only he knew how prized his fur is among the birds this time of year—the magpies and the white-winged choughs—it’s the ultimate in luxury nest insulation. Then he would have realised that the magpie was weighing up its chance of escaping unscathed if it were to quickly pluck a little fur from his fat belly.

That fury animals begin to moult right as birds build their spring nests is a wonderful convenience of nature.

The magpies within whose territory I live have black backs with a white patch behind their necks. There’s an old Bangerang story that explains that two neighbouring clans each had a set of mischievous identical twins, one male pair and one female. So that people could tell them apart, white ochre was painted on the backs of one from each pair. One day the two pairs met, fell in love and were allowed to marry. The twins with white ochre backs married each other, as did the ones without ochre. It wasn’t long before they were all causing mischief again, pushing the clans to the brink of war. But Byamee the sky god came crashing down in the thunder to intervene. He turned the twins into magpies and cast them into the sky, telling the white-backed magpies to stay in the south and the west, and the black-backed magpies to keep to the north and the east. South of my home beyond the mountains, the magpies have white backs.

My black-backed magpie was back Monday morning collecting more of everything for its nest and I wondered how its little construction project had held up in the night’s downpour. Leaving my breakfast, I brushed a palmful of fluff from Caspian, for which he was very appreciative, stretching long and purring. One cool cat, one less furball and one warm baby bird. I flattened it into a felt pancake and, as the magpie was off making a delivery, placed it on the back step where the bird had been foraging. Amusingly, some of my own hair lay damp on the step and I wondered how it managed to excavate that from the dirt archives. Such thorough little creatures. Long hair can tangle a nestling, so I cleared it away then turned my attention to a pot plant that had been pummelled in the storm. Almost instantly, the claws of a little four-toed foot tapped the deck behind, the magpie having lost not a moment in securing its prize. It walked towards me with the fur in its beak and paused, a gesture I’d like to think meant thank you but perhaps served the more likely purpose of checking to see if I had any more, then it turned and walked off behind the house.

Another magpie family often visits our yard, but only to the north side of the house. I suspect they are related to family that reside here because they can often be seen pecking at insects together in the neighbour’s paddock. There are others, too, who live in the surrounding bush and come to visit on Meeting Days. Meeting Days are when all the magpies in the vicinity come to stand in a circle outside my bedroom window and discuss community matters. It’s said they have their own justice system in which an offending magpie stands in the middle of a circle of its peers, which step forward one by one to peck it in punishment. I haven’t witnessed such corporal retribution, but I have watched as certain individuals take turns to strut into the circle’s centre, state their case (sometimes silently), then return to their place. Once, one of the birds got a single peck from another, then they both returned to their places. Was justice served? Or was it unfairly accused? I’ll never know, but I do love witnessing the formality of these Meeting Days.

So nesting season has arrived. It takes days to build a nest. So much care and effort to ensure the structure won’t collapse. It would be a sad sight to see a pale blue egg smashed on the ground. It’s the source of life, and it will be protected at any cost.

My husband gets uncomfortable right about now as it marks the start of the swooping season, the time of year when ordinary humans walk across parklands holding sticks in the air, paint eyes on the back of their hats, and tie zip ties to their bicycle helmets as if they were Roman gladiators entering a battle arena. Magpies will draw blood to protect their nests, which I think is quite endearing. They are the ultimate helicopter parent. Unfortunately, some magpies in public spaces take it a little too far, attacking everyone, and according to Magpie Alert (the national swoop database), swoop season 2025 has begun.

Our garden magpies don’t swoop us. On the contrary, they seem to regard us fondly. They know us by our faces. We give them fur for their nests, water in the heat of summer, a garden full of edible life, and leave them to sunbake in all manner of strange positions, burning off the parasites in their feathers with their wings spread wide and their legs in the air—appearing dead to the world but just asleep, fully trusting in us and the safety of our garden to doze in such vulnerable positions. I don’t know if I’m imagining it, but I feel they grew more trusting in us once our children were born. They know all about fierce love for their offspring and I’d often see them watching mine from above. Sometimes, on summer evenings when the sun stays up late, they sit outside the open window and sing with me as I croon my daughters to sleep. They have a magnificent repertoire, one of the world’s finest. The first time it happened I thought it a lovely coincidence, but time has proven otherwise. It is a magical thing to sing with a magpie, just as it is an honour to share this place with them. This little patch of land is as much theirs as it is ours, and I couldn’t imagine ever telling them otherwise. I would have to be an absolute fool.

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I pinch myself that I didn’t capture a video of this rare cloud formation because, trawling the internet, I’ve never found an image quite like it. Unlike cloudfalls that spill over mountains and ridgelines, this one stood alone, erupting like a gentle rounded volcano perched in the slopes below the ridgeline that curves from Mount Hotham to Mount Loch. Behind it, poking above the clouds was the snow-white peak of Mount Feathertop.

It is amazing how the atmosphere can sculpt such creations. It’s probable that a warm current travelling below the low-lying cloud was pushing upward at the valley’s headwall, bursting through like a giant bubble only to be met with cooler air flowing over the ridge, forcing it back down as if it were a tumbling cascade.

The atmosphere loves to play in the mountains. On days like today when it is wet outside, the damp air rises out of the gullies and curvatures that shape the mountains. About half-way up the range outside my window is a gully that runs horizontally as far as the eye can see. It’s almost imperceptible on a clear day, camouflaged in shades of blue and green, but so intimately defined when it gives birth to the clouds. Frequently in the cooler months, a long thick cloud I call the ‘snake’ forms in this pocket. It returns time and time again. Once, in the midst of a cool wet winter, an outsider confused the rising whisps of this cloud in its early stages of formation for a bushfire, prompting six fire trucks to turn up at my house.

My cloud does look like a snake, but it’s a name I stole many years ago from a movie called Clouds of Sils Maria staring Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart. The story takes place high in the Swiss Alps near the Maloja Pass where the mountains channel the winds to form an unusual cloud formation known as the Maloja Snake, a long serpentine cloud that moves through the Engadin valley like a river. You can sit high in the mountains and watch the snake pass beneath you, like the characters in the film. The Maloja Snake is a real phenomenon. It is both beautiful and ominous, and in the film, it is central to its story as a metaphor for the passing of time, for ambiguity in human relationships, and for cyclical patterns and inevitability. It represents both strength and vulnerability, the weather patterns must be just right. And then over Lake Sils, it dissipates, like the ending of the film. What interpretation of events will our protagonists make? What ending will they choose for themselves? What ending will we choose?

The snake in my valley doesn’t move like the Maloja Snake. It sleeps in the shadows of the mountain and burns off in the sun. But it inevitably returns. It is beautiful, though softly melancholy. And on days like today, between showers of rain, when the mad world has found its way into our small mountain community—for someone here has done the most terrible thing—and our phones ping with reminders to stay inside and lock the doors, I lock my door and stare out the window in search of beautiful things. The snake hasn’t come today. Not yet. Instead, the cloud reaches down from above and cloaks us with a fine mist. Through the glass it seems wildly gentle and comforting, and so I watch it. It barely moves, I cannot discern it, and yet somehow the world outside grows mistier, magical, like time itself has slowed with the cloud’s own ephemeral breath. In this calm I see life. It’s in this calm that we can choose what happens next.

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The moon was full and golden this past weekend, its light breaking through the windows to drag me outside. In the darkness of my little valley, where the town lights cannot reach, each full moon awakes a spectral world of silvery shapes and moon shadows so vivid one can walk around as if it were day. I watched the moon weave between the naked branches of winter as it tangoed with the earth—its gravitas forever pushing and pulling the ocean into a throbbing, beating heart. I squinted my eyes and tried to make out its features through its dazzling brilliance; The Sea of Tranquillity, The Ocean of Storms, the Lunar Highlands, places in its mid to upper regions where humans have walked before. From these places, my eyes travelled down some 1,800km to the moon’s South Pole, and paused. It is here, within two short years (if all goes to plan) that humans will once again touch down and shuffle through the moon dust in their space boots. Then in a few short more, they will build a moon base; a gateway to Mars and beyond, a collection of modular bits and bobs imperceptible from earth. There is ice frozen in the shadowy craters of the south. Water. A source for hydrogen rocket fuel. And there are minerals.

Who will get to them first?

Tucked deep within the edifices of our modern existence has been this sense of inevitability; that humans would go back to not just walk, but to colonise our lunar satellite. To build a space base for the ‘benefit of all peoples’. The United Nations’ Outer Space Treaty insists on things like that; that space exploration be for ‘peaceful purposes’, that it cannot be claimed or owned, that it is ‘the province of all mankind’, and that ‘All stations, installations, equipment and space vehicles on the Moon and other celestial bodies shall be open to representatives of other States Parties to the Treaty on a basis of reciprocity.’ Imagine that, the whole world sharing. It’s an idyllic sentiment, I’ll give it that.

Since 1967, 117 countries have ratified the Outer Space Treaty, including the US, Russia, and China. It’s a number that has grown by the year as space becomes crucial to the current wave of economic, military and communications development. This treaty is an important and very outdated document that means everything and nothing. Everything, because the ideas presented in it are just. And nothing, because (not only is it full of loopholes, but) enforcing it is near impossible. A UN attempt in 1979 to introduce the idea that a separate governing body be responsible for activities on the moon and that all moon resources be shared equally, failed miserably. The Moon Agreement still exists but means very little given none of the major players ratified it.

Its cracks are widening. There are two separate planned bases on the moon: the US-led Artemis Base Camp and the China-led International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), which has the assistance of Russia’s Roscosmos. Both bases are supposedly for the good of mankind, and both have very similar goals, yet the two groups are not, and do not intend to work together. Separately, they are growing their list of signatories to their own almost identical accords, splitting the world of space development in two.

In 2011, the US passed a bill barring NASA from working with China on the basis of national security, and probably with good reason, so it was never going to be likely that China would come begging to join Artemis, and with Russia by its side, it didn’t have to. The move effectively prevented China from using the International Space Station and led China to build its own—the Tiangong Space Station, completed in 2022 and continually inhabited by taikonauts.

Both the US and China pitch their moon projects as having the higher moral ground: China accuses the US of commercialising space for its own economic benefit, and the US is suspicious of China’s military intentions.

NASA believes there is a real possibility that if China were to reach the limited area of water supply first, that the US would be prevented from accessing it. China shares similar concerns, and those concerns carry weight under the Trump regime. Meanwhile, both projects are going tit for tat. Earlier this year, Russia and China spoke separately about their intentions to place a nuclear reactor on the moon sometime after 2033 to power their research station. Then this month, the US confirmed it was increasing the size of its nuclear power capacity on the moon from 40kW to 100kW, with a plan to install it by 2030.

As it stands, the US appears to be on track to reach the South Pole first, with the Artemis III crewed mission scheduled to land there in mid-2027 (although it’s already two years behind schedule and could face further delays due to unresolved challenges with SpaceX’s Starship). The ILRS is less transparent with its progress, but has said the preparation of surface facilities to support crewed landings would begin in 2031. Nevertheless, China’s uncanny ability to execute projects at breakneck speed is keeping the US on its toes.

The Space Race has well and truly restarted. How open to reciprocity will our contestants be? Will their endeavours be for the ‘benefit of all peoples’? Or just some?

And where, in the UN Treaty, does our commercial sector fit? Our Elon Musks and Jeff Bezos’s, our Lockheed Martins and Rocket Labs.

A record US$613 billion was invested in the global space economy in 2024, and 78% of this was from the commercial sector. Space activity is storming ahead. In the first six months of 2025, a space launch took place every 28 hours—a record 149 liftoffs, of which more than half were made by SpaceX alone.

There are about 10,000 active satellites now orbiting the earth, more if you count the space junk. Soon, those satellites will be joined by the missile interceptors and laser beams of Trump’s Golden Dome defence shield. Weapons in space. Now that’s most definitely pushing the boundaries of the Outer Space Treaty, although the commercial manufacturer Lockheed Martin assures us it is ‘a revolutionary concept to further the goals of peace through strength…’. Silly me, I guess it’s OK then.

It was a waning gibbous moon last night as the earth’s shadow crept across the lunar surface. In a few days the South Pole will be submerged in darkness until it begins to reveal itself once more; a new moon. And soon, a new flag will be planted there, and new colour footage of astronauts—or cosmonauts or taikonauts—bouncing in moon dust will beam down around the world.

I try to think beyond all the political jockeying in the US and China’s new Cold War for world domination and focus on the possibilities that will emerge from all this. It has been 53 years since humans last walked on the moon, and soon, those of my generation will witness this for ourselves. But we’re very likely to witness something more. The goals of Artemis are very clear; in the next 15 to 20 years, we will likely see humans take their very first steps on Mars. We will reach the red planet. Mars, some 225 million kilometres away, that tiny flickering red light in the sky.

So far from home. How fragile our little blue planet must look from way over there.

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Water is a master rejuvenator, shapeshifting as it journeys over billions of years. Who else pressed it to their lips, sucked it through its roots, or flushed it into the sewer. Ancient beasts, extinct Gondwana forests, deep sea creatures. You. Humans are, on average, 60% water. It flows in and out of our bodies, sustains us, and when we die, it leaves us to continue its journey, vapourising into the sky or travelling through the ground where it is filtered and returns to us anew. Water pulses through every living thing. It is the one thing that connects all life on earth—not even oxygen can do that. You could very well be drinking the same molecule that once passed through a dinosaur, or perhaps, the brain of Archimedes. Maybe even his bathwater!

From my window here in the alpine valleys of Victoria I see glimpses of the clear-water creek that carved this tight valley. Its ripples shimmer through the scrub and bracken fern as it descends from its source in the Great Dividing Range above my home, springing from underground, melting from the snow, captured by little gullies that funnel it down an arterial network, gathering and growing molecule by molecule until it spills into the Ovens River, cutting between the canyon where whitewater leaps over rocks before twisting and turning among the gums, until it leaves the mountain valleys and enters the flat lands, slows, grows tea brown, and merges with the mighty Murray.

We follow the Murray up past the ancient pink salt lake, through the wispy mallee country and to the arid lands near Mildura, where dust storms colour the sky red and sand whips snakelike across the road as we drive. We are flanked by orchards that spring out of the bare earth. There is no grass. Wild goats picking at saltbush stare as we pass. It’s hard to imagine life here without the river.

A little further west is where the Murray meets the Darling. From this confluence, I could forge my way back to my home some 1,000km away, but if I trace the waters up the Darling almost 2,500km in the other direction, I would pass through New South Wales and be standing at the headwaters of the Condamine in Queensland’s Main Range National Park; a tiny spring so delicate one could stand comfortably with a foot planted either side. I once touched the water here and told it I would see I again in 5,000km when I reached the glistening estuary of the Coorong in South Australia, and that I would sit by its side and watch as it reunited with its old friend the sea.

Heading west, we travel to the Riverlands, where the Murray playfully twists and curls, and then twists and curls again to form a scattering of little islands and lagoons before it banks south toward the coast. At Loxton, it is wide and deep blue, buoying the houseboats and the pelicans.

This one amazing river system covers 14% of Australia’s landmass—over 1 million square kilometres, larger than France and Germany combined. It forms in the ancient Great Dividing Range that stretches for 3,500km; a spine-like protrusion that runs down the country like a giant life-giving serpent, birthing rivers and streams that snake coastward, or inland to bring life to the most inhospitable of places.

We leave the river and head south to Naracoorte—the place of running water in Bindjali. It’s some 90km from the southern coastline of Australia, but the ocean waves once crashed along its shores leaving an ancient sand ridge preserved as the East Naracoorte Range. The ocean swirled underground, too, carving out limestone caves, then when its handiwork was done, receded to form a new shoreline, and a new ridge of sand, a pattern it repeated over a million years as the ice at the polar caps grew and sea levels dropped, leaving behind an alluring display of parallel ranges.

In the caves at Naracoorte rests a graveyard of Pleistocene megafauna. We walk past the skull of a diprotodon, a bunyip-sized wombat that could weigh as much as 2.8 tonnes, and the thigh bones of a giant leaf-eating kangaroo that stood up to 3 metres tall. The ancient stories of Australia’s First Nations peoples tell of these giant beasts which died out some 46,000 years ago. They lived here at the same time. And of these stories, the most enduring and widespread are of a creator being in the form of a giant snake—the Rainbow Serpent—which shaped the rivers and the lakes of this great land. These giant snakes were no myth. Perfectly preserved at Naracoorte is the skeleton of the python-like Wonambi, which grew up to 6 metres long. It sits in a glass display by the ticket desk; hundreds of pencil-thin ribs rapped around the skeleton of a marsupial lion.

We can feel the coast now, its magnetic force drawing us nearer and nearer. It’s useless for an Australian to resist the ocean. And so we let it pull us through the wildest of storms to the small beach cove of Carpenter Rocks. The wind and the rain lash the car as we watch the waves crash with ravenous beauty against the shore. But unlike those that once receded to form the ancient ranges between here and Naracoorte, the ocean is returning. Its white foam fingers stretch across the grass and reach for the road as we leave. It comes within centimetres. This water that was once ice, or rain, or a cloud, or a stream, that was once in a drink or a drain, that was carried by ancient asteroids and the bodies of the living. It moves, it creates, it recycles, it brings life, and it destroys. It knows its way across this land. It knows how to mould it into something new. It’s been here before, many times.

And so I return home to my desk and think about what it is I want to tell you, and lost in thought, a cup of tea pressed to my lips, I look out my window and stare at the creek’s hypnotic ripples of silver light as it runs by. It moves with such certainty, not an ounce of fear or hesitation. It just keeps on its way, it’s journey never ending.

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A little update

I’m somewhat sad to say (although a little relieved to lighten the load) that I’m retiring Etymology Monday. I still have my fascination with word histoires, but the time used to write them will be better spent on other things. Behind the scenes, I’m chipping away (albeit, slower than a sloth) at a creative pursuit and my copywriting work is keeping me busy. Last week, a project I was hired to work on won Gold in a state category and will now represent Victoria at the national awards. On another positive note, it appears I’ve become an accidental podcaster. I began releasing the audio recordings of my essays as podcast on the basis of, why not. They’re now substantially more popular than the written copy of my work, so I’m going to run where the wind takes me. My written essays remain my priority, but you will notice each will start with an option to listen (at least, that’s the plan. Let’s see if I can stick to it).

Anyway, I hope you are all well wherever you may be in the world right now. And thank you again for sticking with me. Your support of my work means more than you can imagine.

Thank you for Mind Flexing with me. If you enjoyed this essay, please subscribe on Substack or your favourite podcast app, comment, click the ❤️ button, or share it with someone who would appreciate it. I’ll be back in a fortnight. Until then, keep 💪

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They must have looked very warm, those darling little animals in their fur coats, skinned for meat and then what? We might as well wear them, share in their warmth. You’d have to hypothesize that’s how it all started, this wearing of clothes business; for comfort, for warmth. For surely we didn’t jump straight in with intricate embroideries and uncomfortable cuts for peacockery. In the 300,000-year history of homo sapiens, and in the history of this blue planet, we’re the only living creatures to wear clothing. It’s quite a development, really, to be able to warm ourselves so that we could take over the world—live in the most inhospitable of climates where we surely would not survive if it were not for warmth and shelter.

It would have been quite practical at the start, don’t you think? Imagine, the joy of shoes on your feet on hot scorching sand. The oldest clothing ever found is a pair of woven sandals from Oregon in the United States; shredded sagebrush bark, twined and twisted to form a sole that was tied around the ankle. Found preserved in a cave, they are somewhere between 9,000 and 10,500 years old. The problem with clothing (at least, the lovely biodegradable threads our ancestors wore) is that it doesn’t last. We’ll never find the oldest clothes to have sashayed across the palaeolithic, try as we might. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t exist.

Sewing needles from Siberia date back 50,000 years, and tools found in Morocco, aged between 90,000 and 120,000 years, look similar to those still used to make pelts today. This is reassuring. It would be terrible to think our ancestors shivered their way through the last ice age when it began about 115,000 years ago—it lasted for over 100,000 years! There’s other evidence to suggest they didn’t. Thanks to lice (yes, let’s take this rare opportunity to thank them), we now know humans were dabbling in the craft of clothing long before then. They would have been quite prepared for a little drop in temperature, and for the long overland journeys they were soon to take out of Africa. Researchers at the University of Florida studying the history of body lice discovered through DNA testing that clothing lice diverged genetically from hair lice about 170,000 ago, suggesting they must have had clothes to infest. That’s 170,000 years of fashion design, from fur cloaks to barrel leg trousers, woven sandals to super-high heels. What a transformation! It also means we were naked for a very long time, possibly 130,000 years.

At what point do you suppose things changed? when clothing began to serve more than just a practical purpose? That moment in time when someone thought, Gee, that leopard print loin cloth is doing wonders for Bob’s popularity with the ladies. I gotta get me one of those. Leopards did live in Africa 170,000 years ago. It’s remarkable, really, that leopard print must be the longest cyclical fashion trend on earth and very likely, the universe. Apparently, leopard print shoes are all the rage right now. (but you’re hearing this from someone who lives up a bush track and whose footwear collection consists of gumboots, hiking boots and Ugg boots, so correct me if I’m wrong.)

We may be the only species to wear clothes, but we’re not the only one to appreciate a fashionable display. Birds are very good at such presentations—peacocks, lyrebirds, pheasants, turkeys—the males have evolved to dazzle their women with flair. To shake a tail feather here and do a shimmy over there. It is, in the animal world, mostly the males that put on such displays, to court, to challenge another for a female’s attention. So could it be that men were the very first fashion designers all those palaeolithic years ago? Parading their furs as a sign of strength and wealth? There’s some logic to that, but I can’t imagine women would have been far behind. Perhaps, by two minutes.

Shell beads, around 150,000 years old, found in a cave 50km from the coast in Morocco appear to have been strung on a necklace or garment. Shells are neither warm nor comfortable, although they sure are pretty and so suggest we’ve taken pride in our appearance for a considerable time.

The oldest woven garment ever found is what appears to be a woman’s dress—the Tarkhan Dress—discovered in a mastaba in Egypt and carbon dated to about 5,500 years old. It’s exquisite; teeny tiny linen fibres woven ever so intricately, with little pleats that run up the arms, then gently bend over the shoulders to continue across to a delicate v-neckline. It must have taken weeks, if not months to fashion. A cool $7,327.20 over eight weeks on today’s minimum wage. Wouldn’t that flip fast fashion on its head if we were to pay two-month’s wages for a dress. You wouldn’t casually throw that one in the op-shop bin. And to think, if you looked after it, it could last over 5,000 years!

It's a beautiful dress, this Tarkhan garment, thought to have been worn by a young, slim female within the royal household. It would have to have belonged to someone wealthy at that price! Funny, how clothing had then as it does now, this intrinsic ability to reflect social status, or shape opinion, just through its mere presence. What did the commoners wear in those ancient times? Surely not a two-month weave. It would have to have been, for practicality and economy, more akin to a two-week weave—a bit chunkier, maybe a little scratchy. And wouldn’t we all have known with a side glance of the eye who was of the palace and who was of the street. Despite the years, times haven’t changed.

Virginia Woolf in her 1928 novel Orlando wrote:

“Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.”

Indeed, they are little social indicators, quiet signals, telling others who we are or who we’d like to be, ever changing to reflect our identities. Humans have evolved to wear clothing, and clothing has evolved with us. After 170,000 years, it’s quite clear, they are stitched into the fabric of who we are.

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Don’t miss…

If, like me, you were unable to make this year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival, don’t despair. SWF has begun to drip feed its live sessions to its Podcast and there are some excellent discussions to tangle your thoughts, notably:

• Making a Writer—Charlotte Wood and Colm Tóibín with Michael Williams.

• The State of the Art: The Novel—Samantha Harvey, Rumaan Alam, Torrey Peters, and Robbie Arnott with Kate Evans.

• Samantha Harvey: Orbital—Samantha Harvey with Claire Nichols.

Enjoy!

Thank you for Mind Flexing with me. If you enjoyed this essay, please subscribe, comment, click the ❤️ button, or share it with someone who would appreciate it. I’ll be back in a fortnight. Until then, keep 💪.

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What could possibly be so funny about a dead body in the gutter?

It must have been the wars that rekindled the memory because nothing about waking on Saturday morning could justifiably explain it; one of those unexpected turns of the mind that bear no connection to the immediacy of trying to eke out five minutes more sleep amid the rousing ruckus of children stating authoritatively what they want for breakfast. A synapse triggered by a sound, a smell, a feeling, an image, and before I could say corn flakes, those little sparks had gone and exploded into a time some 15 years ago when my husband broke his tooth eating popcorn in El Paso, Texas. I’d never seen him in so much pain, nor have I since.

A dentist? smirked the man at the motel desk. They played golf on Fridays, and while I can’t substantiate that claim, I can confirm not a single dentist was open. We would have to do what the locals did and cross the Mexican border into Juárez where the dentists didn’t play golf. Juárez, the man said, had one of the highest per-capita rates of dentists anywhere in the world, which was quite possible given it was Friday. It was also one of the world’s most dangerous cities—a war zone—a brutal triangular war between the Juárez and Sinaloa drug cartels, and them and the Mexican Army.

The story I’m about to tell has its place in time, specifically 2010. Things have changed since, as is the transitory nature of the world; the heartbreak doesn’t go away, it just shifts. Some parts of Mexico like Juárez are marginally better, others worse.

So it was October 2010. Simon and I had just mountain biked from the Canadian Rockies along the US continental divide to the Mexican border, 5,574 km (3,484 miles) of pedalling the contours of the mountains, living out of a tent and two small panniers, dodging grizzly bears and sleeping with coyotes. The border town of El Paso marked the official end of the US Great Divide—it was a popcorn-worthy moment. Soon we would be in Mexico, but we planned to avoid Juárez with quite an elaborate detour: a train to San Antonio, ride the remaining 1,200km to Pensacola, ditch the bikes and fly to Cancún in the south of the country.

But the tooth. Simon was certain he would not survive a weekend of molar nerve pain, but he might just survive Juárez. After all, that’s what everyone did, right?

The lengths one will go to for an emergency root canal.

A small maroon van arrived Saturday morning to transport us across the border. When the door opened, we got in. We got in like it was a normal thing to do, like all wives accompanied their husbands to the dentist. We didn’t say much, our heads too busy creating scenarios that involved anything but actual dentists. The driver said they used to take around 100 people a day across the border for dental treatment, but nowadays it was more like 10. Hang on, everyone does this, right?

Neither of us had been to a war zone, and to tell you the truth, I didn’t expect Juárez to be one in the conventional sense. I had imagined it to be like other places haunted by undercurrents of civil unrest: armed militia in doorways, air so tense it could be shattered by a breath, a snap of the eyes at anything that moved too fast or moved at all. Juárez was a big city—over 1.3 million people called it home in 2010—and I expected to see them, perhaps going about their business in the way one would if you were to make a wrong turn in Baltimore. I expected to see a few people on the streets.

There were no people on the streets.

Life in Juárez had deteriorated rapidly in the three years prior to our dental emergency and 2010 was a particularly violent year. The infamous Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán and his Sinaloa Cartel had invaded the turf of Vicente Carrillo Fuentes’s Juárez Cartel and threaded its way through a vulnerably poor population. More than 3,100 people were murdered in this single city in 2010, and that’s not counting the hundreds missing, some since found in mass graves. Prior to our arrival, around 7,500 soldiers had been deployed to Juárez to support the 2,000 federal police and 2,000 municipal police in suppressing the violence. It was the setting for Sicario.

Into this world we came in a little maroon van through streets devoid of people, where the only things that moved were a few anxious cars and the soldiers staked out on street corners behind sandbag walls, watching us in their bulletproof vests and helmets, hands latched to the machine guns ready in their turrets. The driver came to a stop outside a pale blue multistorey building in a side street and ushered us over to a solid door locked behind iron bars. There was no sign to indicate the door belonged to a dentist, the windows were boarded up and behind bars like every other window in the city. He knocked, and we waited in silence. The soldier on the corner shifted position. I watched the street. It was a very long minute before the door creaked open just enough for a single eye to look us up and down, and approving of what it saw, opened the door to the life hiding within: a bustling waiting room of men, women and children busily inspecting specks on walls, the TV, magazines, the water cooler, and chip packets.

The dentist, when it was our turn to see him, was so professional that we felt a little guilty for half fearing Simon would be sedated with tequila (although it probably would have done the trick just fine). He performed the root canal and took a mould of Simon’s mouth, told us he would have to come back the following day for a crown.

Afterwards, we dashed across the road and squeezed behind the soldier and his sandbags to enter a narrow tortería, one side lined with bar stools facing a counter of toasted sandwiches. We ate, two men alongside us, then hurried back, waiting nervously outside the dentist’s door until the driver came out and we got in the van with its superficial safety aura. It would take hours to cross back into the US.

The following day started much the same; the journey into Mexico was seamless—the little maroon van drove straight in, no lines, no customs and in no time, Simon’s tooth had been crowned. (In the years since, dentists have commented what a particularly good job was done.)

A nurse jumped in the back seat of the van to make the trip over the border with us. It was Día de los Muertos—Day of the Dead—and I scanned the streets in search of any hint of celebration, but the souls on the street that day weren’t living. A series of empty soccer fields leached a bloody tear for that city of people who lived behind self-imposed bars. The cartels predominantly targeted each other, but it didn’t take much to get caught in the crossfire.

The van turned onto an arterial road that ran toward the border, a concrete wall masking its western side as it curved around a slow bend. There was nothing around us, no view, no cars, just the road and the concrete wall, so it was easy to spot the dead body in the gutter—a man, lying face down, unnaturally contorted, slumped in the manner you would expect from a lifeless form rolled out of a moving vehicle. How long had he been there? Minutes? Hours?

The driver said something and the nurse laughed. She laughed, then the driver laughed, and it was in this strange reality in which dead bodies in the gutter were trivial that I realised we hadn’t stopped—there was a dead man and we’d driven wide around and kept going, because dead bodies in the gutters of Juárez were a dime a dozen. I looked at the nurse who, though staring at the back of an empty seat was somewhere else entirely, and I watched her sit there with a detached smile across her lips as she listened to the driver. They laughed because they were powerless, because they were angry, because that man wasn’t one of them—he was a criminal—because this was their existence, because of the stupidity of it all, the greed, the desperation, and because what else could they do? It wasn’t funny, it was debilitating, so they laughed to survive.

And I found it interesting that I wasn’t so much shocked by the sight of the murdered man either given the circumstances. I didn’t laugh, but I observed within myself a strange detachment to that body, a sadness that extended beyond him to those forced to live in his shadow. He had the stigma of a criminal, of someone who brought this on himself. Many Mexicans believed the scum deserved to kill each other.

It's a very human reaction to grieve the innocent, but less so the guilty. That’s not to say there is joy in their demise, but rather an eerie distance.

Simon and I were leaving that world. In a few hours we would be back across the border on our way to the south of Mexico where we would spend the next three months. But my grief for those who couldn’t leave, for those who found the only thing to do was to laugh at the absurdity of it all, came back to haunt me unannounced on Saturday morning. As I said, it must have been the wars because down here, beneath the snow-capped mountain ranges and rising sun, the kookaburra was laughing at the beautiful day.

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Etymology Monday

This week’s word is simply beautiful and shares a link between eyes and rainbows.

Thank you for Mind Flexing with me. If you enjoyed this essay, please subscribe, comment, click the ❤️ button, or share it with someone who would appreciate it. I’ll be back in a fortnight. Until then, keep 💪.

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Thank you for Mind Flexing with me. To join in the conversation, jump in the comments at mindflexing.com.au. I’ll be back in a fortnight. Until then, keep 💪.

Read The Transcript

Thank you for Mind Flexing with me. To join in the conversation, jump in the comments at mindflexing.com.au. I’ll be back in a fortnight. Until then, keep 💪.

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“What is burning there is the memory of mankind.”

―Theodotus in Caesar and Cleopatra by George Bernard Shaw.

Some 2,308 years ago on the western edge of the Nile Delta alongside the turquoise waters of the Mediterranean Sea, the hands of men chiseled and stacked the stones of the Mouseion—the museum—a complex like no other, not architecturally speaking, but for the culture that flourished inside. It was not unlike a modern-day university, where scholars walked the covered halls discussing philosophy, lectured in the auditorium, debated in the dining hall. It was a place of thought, of ideas, of science and medicine, a living embodiment of the nine muses who inspired the world with music, dance, poetry, history, astronomy and comedy. A treasure chest of civilisation, and at its core lay the home of knowledge: the great Library of Alexandria, said to have possibly housed as many as half a million manuscripts at its zenith. Imagine the histories they contained, imagine the stories—all gone.

It's a tragic mystery. No one definitively knows what happened to the library. There are stories about Julius Caesar accidently burning it down in 48 BCE after setting fire to enemy ships in the harbour, there are stories about the Christians targeting pagan institutions some 440 years later, then similar stories about the Muslims another 250 years after that. Many believe a combination of all these led to a gradual decline, with neglect creeping in amid political instability and a changing economy.

All those stories, gone. All those memories, lost.

Surely, we wouldn’t make such a mistake today. Surely, we would see ourselves to be the foolish creatures of habit that we are and stop the library burning.

The library likely died gradually, like being devoured by acid story by story. Like 9,000 tonnes of nitrogen oxide corroding its histories year after year; 40 years because of ignorance, and then 45 more because of greed.

Surely, if there were a place on earth that stored more than one million stories (more than twice that of the Library of Alexandria), spanning 50,000 years of history, surviving depths of time we struggle to comprehend, surely we would want to save that.

Stories that tell of an Ice Age in which the sea was low and Tasmanian Tigers (since hunted to extinction for eating sheep) roamed the tropics some 4,500km from Tasmania. Stories that tell of songlines that travel from the archipelago across the landscape to the heart that is Uluru, stories of the Seven Sisters constellation in the sky, of cultural lore, of ceremony, of the spirit world, of how to distribute meat, of humans and tall ships, and how life changed with the rising sea, of sea turtles and dugongs; of the ancestral beings—the Marrga—who shaped the land and seas, who created life and lore. And amid all this, sits the oldest depiction of a human face.

This is a library of over one million petroglyphs carved and chiseled by ancient hands over the course of 50,000 years. It’s called Murujuga, and it’s burning a slow acidic death. It lies in the remote north-west of Australia on a peninsular that juts out like a hip bone of volcanic rock into the Dampier Archipelago. It’s like no other place on earth, not only because of its immense library of stories, but incredibly because these stories have maintained an unbroken link to the Ngurra-ra Ngarli peoples of the region today, one of the oldest continuing cultures on earth, who can read and understand these stories put there by their ancestors. The spirits within these petroglyphs are still well and truly alive.

Murujuga is the oldest of the world’s great libraries. You’ll find it nestled between the burning smokestacks of Woodside Petroleum’s Karratha Liquefied Natural Gas Plant on the North West Shelf, an operation that has spewed billions of tonnes of emissions into the air since the 1970s. Its acidic air disrupts the alkaline environment that has preserved this library for tens of thousands of years, settling on the ancient rocks and devouring the memories of mankind.

Research has found significant degradation of the petroglyphs since the 1970s. It's a case of petroglyphs vs petrochemicals.

Gas operations in the North West Shelf were scheduled to end, appropriately, in 2030. But in a shocking, but not surprising decision, the federal government last week indicated it would allow Woodside to extend its petrochemical operations until 2070, spewing anywhere between 6 to 15 billion tonnes of emissions into the atmosphere and making a mockery of net zero targets.

The climate ramifications of such a carbon bomb are immense, and ones I know you know all too well, so I won’t dwell on these equally important aspects of this absurdity. There are so many underlying factors to this decision. Gross political donations that can serve no other purpose than to influence and corrupt, power struggles between political factions, and between state and federal politicians, opposition from the powerful mining industry and its allied population, trade dollars, and economics. All can be refuted. Long-time economic commentator Ross Gittins explained in The Sydney Morning Herald this week, the economic and employment argument in favour of the extension is unjustifiable.

It is hard to compete with the noise generated by money and power. It is very loud. But overcoming it isn’t impossible. When the public so chooses, it can be very, very noisy, at which point, any listener choosing to preserve their sanity and their eardrums will cave to such a high-pitched cacophony.

UNESCO has raised its voice. The United Nation’s body dedicated to international cooperation in education, science, culture, and communication, last month warned it is likely to reject Murujuga’s bid for World Heritage Status citing the environmental degradation that surrounds it.

And I too have written to the Prime Minister and the Environment Minister, an act which means nothing when done alone, but can create an earth-shaking noise when cascading in the tens of thousands.

The government plans to appeal to UNESCO and says it has attached strict conditions to the North West Shelf expansion to ensure the protection of Murujuga. These conditions have not been made public, and Woodside has until next week to respond.

A deal hasn’t been signed, but the government sure is playing a dangerous game with an industry that has so frequently displayed disregard for history and the environment. Need I mention the 46,000 years of human history at Juukan Gorge, which last month commiserated the five-year anniversary of being blown to smithereens by Rio Tinto without consequence.

More than one million stories over 50,000 years of human history, a changing climate, rising sea levels and a warming atmosphere. If the great Library of Alexandria can teach us anything, it’s that this is the time for us to make noise.

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A little more…

If you have 13 min to spare, this mini doco The Fight to Save Murujuga, written and produced by Stephen Long at The Australia Institute, provides an insight into the scientific evidence that demonstrates Woodside’s negative impact on Murujuga. It’s worth watching for the geography alone.

Etymology Monday

This week’s word has me feeling a little hungry.

Thank you for Mind Flexing with me. If you enjoyed this essay, please subscribe, comment, click the ❤️ button, or share it with someone who would appreciate it. I’ll be back in a fortnight. Until then, keep 💪.

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Twice we have taken our four- and two-year-olds camping and twice we have unequivocally declared, ‘Never again’. The drama! Bedtime meltdowns shared with the entire campground (my apologies), tantrums over not being allowed to slide down the 500m cliff (non-negotiable), run off and lost in the bush (again), refusals to get in the car when it’s time to leave (cue the tedious pantomime). We, the adults, could be immersed in the most beautiful of surrounds, in stereotypically astounding moments, and have missed it all save for a side glance and a mental note—‘Ah, a sunset’—as I, seeing my toddler has fallen backward and is sliding down a giant granite bolder headfirst, grab her by the ankle. Life saved, she’s straight back at her acrobatics. In an alternate universe, I would have been watching the sunset, but hey, it will set again.

Never again! Never, we say, for a few weeks at least… because in just over a month we’re leaving on a near two-week camping trip through the southern parts of Australia in the middle of winter (because what’s a little freezing cold ever done to dull a mood? Hah!) We’ve planned a wonderful 2,000km circuit of nature, starting on the Murray River then travelling north to the sandy time capsule of Mungo National Park, then south past a pink salt lake and rolling desert dunes, dinosaur fossils in underground caves, and down to the ancient and elaborate fish traps of Budj Bim on Gunditjmara Country.

The thing is, the kids love it, and somehow, when it’s all over—the four of us alive—and we reflect on such memories, somehow, we (the adults) love it too.

Part of it is accepting that we can’t immerse ourselves in these outdoor moments as deeply as we once did. With the kids so young and wildly adventurous, our attention cannot waver from them for more than seconds at a time. But there’s more to it than a mere acceptance of this sacrifice. There’s something in the way we remember these moments that throws a rose-coloured tint over the entire memory, including the stressful bits. Somehow our minds have played tricks on us, transforming these stresses into things we can laugh about. Our blood pressure may have skyrocketed, but wasn’t it a marvellous trip.

The Peak-End Rule is what they call it in psychology. Our brains condense a memory into being positive or negative based on how we felt at the peak of that experience—its most intense moment of joy or otherwise—and also, how we felt at the end. If there were elating moments of joy, those feelings are valued above all else and will set the tone for that entire memory, overriding the crappy parts as mere trifles. And perhaps, in the grand scheme of things, they are just that—trifles.

Because there were moments of joy. The fleeting sunset locked in my mind like an unmoving photo. The feeling of the electrically charged atmosphere coursing through my body, the grounding of the earth. The shape of the rocks, carved by water and time. The sky and how it has no end. And ultimately, the wonder of two tiny and curious creatures who have no sense of fear, who marvel at everything they see, and are having the time of their lives. They see the joy in the world, and it reminds me to look for it.

Never again, we say, until next time.

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Etymology Monday

For those who missed it, this week’s word has ancient Aztec origins…

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“You push your thumb down, something like this, but I don’t remember how it goes,” said Ken1 as we stood in the doorway of the Masonic Lodge, the sunlight streaming down over our two hands with contorting thumbs unsuccessfully imitating the ‘secret handshake’.

Ken, a portly 70-year-old red-faced larrikin, gave up; his memory of how his Dad had once shook the hands of others sandpapered by time.

“So he never spoke about what went on inside?” I asked.

Ken shook his head.

“To be honest, I think it was just an excuse for a piss up.”

Funny he should say that because a few days before I had rolled a trolly of beer out of the Lodge’s public hall and into a corner near the Robing Room. And that was just the stuff that wouldn’t fit in the fridge, which was better stocked than a bottle-o. There was whiskey in the kitchen.

Near the door was a wall of photos of past Worshipful Masters, the highest rank at a Lodge of Unity. The men wore black suits and long slip-on sky-blue cuffs over their wrists. The once black and white photos had been artificially coloured, giving the rows of predominantly old white men Mar-a-Largo tans. Unadulterated, pleasantly, were the hand-drawn portraits dating back to the late 1800s.

“Some fine gentlemen up there,” said Ken. “And some real scoundrels, too.”

Ken wasn’t a Freemason, and I can’t tell you why we were inside the Masonic Lodge—that, I am contractually forbidden to speak about on the internet. But there’s nothing wrong with a little mystery and intrigue, is there?

Indeed, Masonic Lodges—the home of the mysterious medieval fraternities whose places of worship grace almost every town in Australia—had intrigued me for most of my life. I never saw anyone go in or come out. But here I was, having ducked into the local hardware store and, being directed to the key cutting section, presented with the keys to the Lodge’s most secret chamber by the Worshipful Master himself. How times had changed that I—a woman—had been let inside.

From the public hall, the key unlocked a set of double doors that opened into a windowless room. I flicked on the lights and a dim golden glow spread across a royal blue carpeted chamber. Timber chairs lined the walls, two rows that appeared for lower-ranked worshippers. In the middle of each west and south wall was a timber throne with a dais and a gravel that gave the room a court-like appearance, and yet, it had all the presence of a presbytery. On the eastern wall, raised by a step, was a throne that was larger than the rest and flanked by two smaller thrones of equal size to those on the west and south walls. There was a pyramid on a stand, and a number of staffs placed strategically around the room. But most intriguing, for me at least, was the room’s centre to which each chair diligently faced. Lying there was a rug of black and white chequers aligned on an angle like diamonds. It was framed with a yellow border with a hundred or more triangles lining its edges.

It struck me that I had unconsciously thought that seeing inside a Lodge of Unity would somehow reveal the secrets of what went on in these mysterious places. Looking at that rug-centric room, this 700-year-old fraternity with its code words, symbols and secret handshakes had grown more mysterious than ever.

I took Ken inside the Lodge and he shuddered in the dim light. He looked around and with half a smile, said it was scary then walked out. I watched him leave hurriedly like a child in his father’s presence, forbidden to know the room’s secrets.

There’s a magnetism to not knowing. The mystery taunts the mind so much so that it can reach the point where we no longer wish to know.

In the same days as I was inside the Masonic Lodge, I finished reading Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood, a book in which an unnamed protagonist goes to live in a convent for reasons unsaid. The mystery surrounding this scenario is heightened by our quick realisation that our protagonist is not religious. It’s intriguing, and despite gaping holes in the character’s narrative, the plot remains strong. In fact, by omitting an explanation from the story, the reader is forced to focus on the psychology of what unfolds. The things left unsaid give our minds room to invent, guess and contemplate a backstory, and that’s part of the joy of reading this tale. It’s a thought-provoking book that earnt Wood a place on the 2024 Booker Prize shortlist.

As humans, we try to solve and rationalise, to understand the world that surrounds us and it’s tempting to pretend in literature that we have all the answers.

"I don’t know why people expect art to make sense,” the late filmmaker, artist, actor and musician David Lynch told the Los Angeles Times in 1989. “They accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense."

I thought of this as I Googled ‘black and white chequered rug in the middle of a Masonic Lodge’. The answer, I quickly found, was that it resembles the floor of King Solomon’s Temple and symbolises the balance between opposing forces, like good and evil or ignorance and knowledge. By placing it at the centre, it serves as a reminder that life consists of both positive and negative experiences, and that wisdom comes from navigating both. A rather satisfying answer, I thought. But I found myself not wanting to know more, not wanting to dig too deep, which for me, is a strange sensation.

I enjoyed the mystery too much to tear it down. And seeing what I had inside that room made the mystery all the more tantalising.

I did, of course, dig a little deeper. I am me, after all. The secrecy that once shrouded the Freemasons has largely been lifted and their ‘secrets’ are now splashed all over the internet. But I left before discovering too many of them, except the one I really wanted to know. Let’s just say that when I next bump into Ken, we’ll shake hands and the sandpapered dust of time will scatter in the wind to reveal a fine polish, and in that moment, he’ll remember. ♦

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Etymology Monday

For those who missed it on Substack Notes, the word of the week has something to do with two little ragamuffins who live in my house and enjoy doing creative things with crayons.

Thank you for Mind Flexing with me. If you enjoyed this essay, please subscribe, comment, click the ❤️ button, or share it with someone who would appreciate it. I’ll be back in a fortnight. Until then, keep 💪.

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