Non Fiction Stories

As wealth continues to gather in the bank accounts of the secure few, a swathe of the Australian middle-class is languishing in part-time and casual work with stagnant pay. The splintering of the workforce is turning many middle-class white-collar workers into short-term contract fodder. This has historical ramifications for Australia and the western world because,…

Let me take you down to the Strawberry Fields estate, as we follow those who deliver the monthly Labour Force Survey (LFS). The estate is an imaginary place but there’s nothing fictive about high unemployment in working and middle class suburbs across Australia, even though the LFS statistics would tell us otherwise. This story examines…

‘To err is human, to forgive, canine’, anon This is a love story. Some say they let a dog in to their lives but in my case, a black 12-week old Labrador crossed with a Rottweiler (a Labweiler), allowed me in to hers. One morning during the scorching summer of 2008, as my wife and…

Dogs. Even the word leaps up and is full of fun. It bounds up at you like a five year old child and then tears around the back yard until its exhausted and falls at your feet for a pat. But there is much more to domestic dogs than my anthropomorphic introduction. My interest in…

To be or not to be, isn’t the right question. It’s how in the last years, months or days of our lives, we choose to live. This story is about the palliative care movement and the freedom and authenticity it offers, as eternity rises to meet us. While much spurious rubbish has been written about…

As I boarded the flight from Adelaide to New York, a large poster of a smiling Cathay Pacific flight attendant in her bright red uniform, beamed at me. I’d already seen her picture in the carpark and at the check-in counter. At John F Kennedy airport, as I was herded through the duty free –…

In the Western world, we are taught that order prevails over chaos. Unfortunately, the future of Australian politics will be more like that found in the Indian Vedas and Upanishads, where order and chaos go hand-in-hand. The ALP and the Coalition have gravitated to the dead centre of the economic-political spectrum, by appealing to the…

When Catch 22 was first released 50 years ago last October, the reviews ranged from the uncomprehending to the perceptive. Nelson Algren wrote that Catch-22, ”was not merely the best American novel to come out of World War II; it was the best American novel to come out of anywhere in years.” Joseph Heller’s monumental…

Australia is stuck in a Sargasso Sea of inept political and business leadership, so let’s follow the men who fought on the Kokoda Track, who against all odds, stopped the Japanese advance less than 50 kilometres from Port Moresby. In the mid and latter months of 1942, Australians fought alone against the Imperial Japanese Army,…