Thesis Snippets: Rivers and making better

Restoration isn’t about taking a riverscape back to a set point when all was well, as is the popular view of restoration. It isn’t fixing up. It isn’t undoing what was done. Rather, it is about changing the direction in which a river’s becoming moves, by intervening in both the geomorphic and socio-cultural landscapes of […]

Thesis snippets: who are you, Los Angeles?

The interplay of perfection and imperfection has long characterised writing about Los Angeles. In a guide to the city in the 1930s, the project supervisor John D Keyes promised a publication which aimed ‘to present Los Angeles truthfully and objectively, neither glorifying it or vilifying it.’ He goes on to lament that ‘for many decades […]

Thesis snippets: rivers and their many faces

My very earliest forays into discovering the Los Angeles River, from a distance in Australia, had me thinking that it was all wide, trapezoidal flood control channel, like in the film Grease where Danny and Leo race hot-rods along the downtown stretch, their respective admirers watching on, every shot filled from edge to edge with […]

A short guide to being human

I cried this morning. Yesterday, when the photograph of tiny asylum seeker Aylan Kurdi dead on the shorefront appeared across world media I raged with anger. But this morning, I looked some more, and I just wept. What kind of humans are we? What kind of humans lock down borders to fellow humans fleeing the horrors […]

The mysteries of life…and water kefir

Life is replete with mysteries. They make conversations rich and adventures possible. Mysteries get me up in the mornings, and they soothe me to sleep at night. Right now, one of the world’s little mysteries is bubbling and fizzing away quietly on my bench top: water kefir, on its second fermentation. It’s a mystery because […]

Another day, another protest

  These past few weeks I’ve found myself part of three community protests: first greeting the dawn with anti-fracking campaigners at Bentley in Northern New South Wales, then rallying with more than 8000 other citizens at Sydney’s March in May, all of us reeling from the just-released federal budget, and then pounding the city streets […]