Non Fiction Stories

The liberal media, who were called ‘liars’ by Trump throughout his presidency – and with good reason in some cases – have portrayed the more whacky elements of the far right such as Qanon or the Proud Boys, as the vanguard of poor racists who have lost their cultural capital; the powerless, unemployed and underemployed…

Auditors assure the accuracy of a company’s financial records for shareholders, the public and the economy at large. It’s a matter of trust. The economy relies especially heavily on the exactitude and probity of the ‘Big Four’ – Deloitte, PwC, EY, and KPMG – as they are the only institutions big enough to audit multinational…

I’m wary of nostalgia because its like hippopotimus wallowing in the mud holes of yesteryear. For hippos, that might be good fun. For humans with a predilection for nostalgia (our culture is full of it), it suggests the past is better than the present, when there is no objective reason to believe that. Even so,…

From 1976 to 2019, around 4000-9000, South Australians (departures minus arrivals) left the state each year. Many were professional couples in their 20’s and 30’s and university graduates. It’s a rite of passage to leave home in search of new challenges, or to escape unemployment. I did and I was better for it. But how…

“How many patterns of life were based on kindred misconceptions, how many wolves do we feel on our heels, while our real enemies go in sheepskin by?” ‘Under the Volcano’, Malcolm Lowry. The social webs of friendships, clubs, community and the workplace, are becoming stretched for a variety of complex reasons. One of the perverse…

If you open a copy of Montaigne’s ‘Essays’, you won’t find a well-structured treatise. Instead you will find speculative pieces with titles such as ‘Of Friendship’, ‘Of Liars’ and ‘Of Smells’. In the same spirit, I write of books and bookshops. I have much to thank bookshops for. When I was 12, I walked in…

The Australian novelist David Foster once said, “I’m not a nice guy. I don’t even want to be a nice guy. I have to over-correct for the mealy-mouthed quality in contemporary Australian life.” Of late – and maybe this is a psycho-social side effect of the Coronavirus restrictions – I too have lacked felicity, as…

In the beginning, God created Brownhill Creek. It ran past my backyard in Goodwood and its banks were chock-full of bamboo, cumquats, apricots and wild fig trees. In 1965, my job as a blond, snotty-nosed street ‘gangster’, was to protect the land from the migrant Italian kids. We called it ‘The Land’ to signify possession….

We socially construct the world around us through schooling, workmates, friends, family and the media. We experience the world from a specific and unique perspective, and that is our individual ‘reality’. This story focuses on how the news media ‘injects’ a world view in to that reality, creating delusion more akin to schizophrenia than an…