Essays and Articles
Selected Essays and Articles
The Fatal Shore: South Australia’s algal bloom
Review of Andrew Pippos’ The Transformations
Review of Catherine Chidgey’s The Book of Guilt
Review of Josephine Rowe’s Little World
Review of Colum McCann’s Twist
Elegy, Southwest by Madeleine Watts review – powerful, poignant and suffused with millennial dread
Waves are getting bigger. Is the world ready?
Brutality muffles anything American Primeval has to say
Review of Sean Wilson’s You Must Remember This
Humanity’s future – review of Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird
Our sky turned red. In black summer, Australia stepped off ‘some kind of precipice’
The Saturday Paper: the best books of 2024
AI isn’t about unleashing our imaginations, it’s about outsourcing them. The real purpose is profit
Pulitzer Prize winner’s rapturous new novel is bewitching – review of Richard Powers’ Playground
The Blazing World: on John Vaillant’s Fire Weather and the New Age of Fire
Big cat hunters become the hunted in beautiful Tasmanian western – review of Robbie Arnott’s Dusk
Is oral history more durable than written history?
How the Continual Movement of Wildlife Regulates the Natural World
‘It’s like looking at ghosts’: inside the Australian Museum’s extinction cabinets
Summer in the inner west: fig trees, cicadas and the warm possibility of night
No mow: is Australia’s long love affair with lawn ending?
The agony and the ecstasy: MDMA therapies
My sci-fi novel about recreating an extinct species is becoming a reality
How are our cities going to look in a rapidly heating world?
Falling: grief and loss in the pandemic
Could bringing Neanderthals back to life save the environment?
Terror, hope, anger, kindness: the complexity of life as we face the new normal
Elemental summer: into the deep
Unearthed: Last Days of the Anthropocene
Five Books: the best climate change novels
How Australia’s Coal Madness Led to Adani
A Family of Disguises: Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight
Work in Progress: On writing The Resurrectionist
Writers on Reading: Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams
Strange Weather: Writing the Anthropocene
The Death of Negative Man: On writing comics
The Beginning is Nigh: Caspar Henderson’s Book of Barely Imagined Beings
Encounters With The Uncanny: On Ghosts, Ghost Stories and Brain Science
The Element of Need: Murder and Memory in Adelaide (available for Kindle, iBooks, Google Play and Kobo)
“We have pierced the veneer of outside things”: Four books about Antarctica
A New Type Of Conversation
Some reflections on why I started blogging and the ways the experience has affected my life as a writer and my writing. Originally published in Australian Author.
The Hugo Award for Best Novel Shortlist 2010
John Wyndham and his Plan for Chaos
Growing content: a big future for little mags
Never real and always true: on depression and creativity
Also available in pdf form from Griffith Review.
The idiot box grows a brain
A piece from the Australian Literary Review about the rise of the new television.
Great White Tale
An account of several days spent cage-diving with Great White Sharks off the southern coast of South Australia, together with some reflections on wildness, and the place of the shark and the predator in the human imagination.
Bloody Beauties: The Rise and Rise of Vampire Lit
Stealing Memory’s Thunder: James Frey and the rise and rise of fake memoir
The Island in the Mind: Rodney Hall’s Metahistories
Beyond the Break: On Surfing and Writing
The Lands Within
A discussion of the allure of fantasy, originally written to coincide with the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in 2007.
The Final Countdown
Western culture has been waiting for the end of the world for more than 2000 years. What is it that makes the notion of the apocalypse so seductive?
Bread and Sirkuses: Empire and Culture in Peter Carey’s The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith and Jack Maggs
city of tongues 