At the center of the story sits a zoo, The Samui Exotic Park, and its owners, Thai Jindarat Sattyapan and her French-Italian husband Kevin. When I first read this story, I learned that some months earlier Jindarat had put up a sign which read Free Palestine, and had then began refusing admission to visitors from Israel. She said that the decision to do so followed a repeated pattern of behaviours from Israeli guests at the park, including people refusing to pay admission, stealing animal feed paid for by other customers, ignoring the rules of the park and, in one especially bizarre incident, squirting milk into a pig’s face while filming themselves laughing about it.

I had also read that the zoo had been the subject of a coordinated online attack, with people sharing a flood of one-star reviews in response to the ban on Israelis. Curious to see them for myself, I went looking. What I found was far less dramatic than I’d expected, with the majority of complaints spread across the previous year and focused on the zoo enclosures, overcrowding of animals and the sad state of a lion cub residing there. Whatever was going on online regarding the supposed discrimination was not obvious from the reviews alone.

Honestly, at the time it felt more like the kind of petty foreigner grist which periodically boils up in heavily touristy places like Samui, erupts and gets amplified for a few days until it disappears, replaced by the next cycle of outrage. Except that this incident didn’t just disappear…

A week or so later, I saw a video posted by an Israeli woman who documented an incident which occurred at the park, during which she and her family had been denied entry on the basis of their nationality. We can barely see the husband in the video, however we can clearly hear the voice of his wife who is calmly asking why they are being denied entry. Meanwhile, Kevin, the owner, becomes increasingly abusive towards both of them, swearing at them before headbutting the husband in the neck and throwing a plastic sign at them as they retreat. Their two young daughters were with them during the incident and reportedly felt frightened and distressed by what they had seen.

This was then followed by a number of threats being directed at Jindarat and Kevin, resulting in the involvement of local Thai Police. After setting up a checkpoint outside the zoo, the police apprehended a man named Mr. Jacob, who was fined 5000 baht by the Koh Samui Provincial Court for making threats against Jindarat. A separate threat was also made online, with a claim that someone had paid 500,000 baht as a bounty on the life of Kevin, and which police are continuing to investigate.

Then just a few days ago, French news reported that Kevin’s mother’s home had been targeted in an arson attack. French police have opened an investigation into the incident, however despite the extraordinary timing, there has been no evidence found which connects the arson to the events in Samui at this point.

By now, the seemingly petty foreigner drama which I had been watching unfold, had undoubtedly morphed into something far uglier. It was also becoming much more difficult to work out whose account of events I believed. Reports I have since read about comments Kevin has made on various social media sites, suggest that his language has moved well beyond criticism of Israeli tourist behaviour, into what read clearly as anti-Jewish slurs. Reading his own replies back to some of the one-star reviews online has also done little to reassure me, as he frequently comes across as bullying and aggressive, causing me a degree of doubt over whether I can trust his version of events.

Making this thread of evidence more uncomfortable still, is that the complaints that Jindarat has made about Israeli tourist behaviours could absolutely be true. These two stories do not cancel each other out - Kevin can behave appallingly without every allegation made by him and his wife being false. Similarly, Israeli tourists can have an established reputation as visitors who behave badly in places like Samui, without every Israeli family arriving at the zoo intending to live up to that stereotype.

It was somewhere amidst the escalation of these events which made me start to think about this story from a different perspective… mine. Lately I have been wrestling with how I view the actions of the Israeli State and what they are doing in Gaza and what happens when my certainty about those actions begins to shape how I see individual Israelis.

How do I look clearly at what Israel is doing: the continuation of it’s Genocide in Gaza, increasing settler violence in the West Bank, its destruction and occupation of territory beyond its borders, polling which shows overwhelming support for its Zionist policies, the targeting of aid workers like Australian Zomi Francom, the conduct of soldiers and treatment of activists including citizens of my own country? How do I hold all of that alongside the extraordinary human suffering and loss inflicted upon people throughout the region, without allowing it to become the same lens through which I judge an individual Israeli standing in front of me?

There is some personal history which sits underneath why this feels so challenging for me. I was raised at least partly in the shadow of two collapsing settler states, one in South Africa and the other in the country which was Rhodesia before it became Zimbabwe. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I have spent my entire adult life believing, without much need for convincing, that the kind of settler domination imposed upon Palestinians can’t sustain itself indefinitely, any more than the systems I grew up in the shadow of could. That belief hasn’t moved, nor has anything I have witnessed over the past several years given me any reason to reconsider it.

What has become less certain is how I carry that conviction into my encounters with individual people. What happens when our justified anger at the actions of a State begins to leak into the assumptions we make about the people who happen to have been born into it? As Nelson Mandela said, “People are human beings, produced by the society in which they live.”

Jindarat and Kevin’s story contains the problem in miniature form. They may have had entirely legitimate reasons for being furious about the behaviour of Israeli tourists visiting her business - many do behave appallingly overseas. Recognising and acknowledging this pattern does not need any of us to pretend otherwise simply to avoid feeling uncomfortable. However the moment they put up a sign on the door of their zoo which barred entry to all Israelis, regardless of whether it was their legal right to do so or not, they stopped seeing the people approaching their business as human beings whose conduct they could judge, and started seeing them as nationalities whose conduct they believed they already knew.

There’s a second part to Mandela’s quote above, which is, “You encourage people by seeing the good in them.” This second part is what complicates this situation for me. If people are produced by the societies they live within, how much does that society allow me to presume about the person it has produced? How do we see the good in those who have been produced in a society which, by so many measures that I value, I find abhorrent?

Ubuntu asks me to locate my own humanity through my relationships with other people. My recent inquiries into Buddhist thought keep pulling me back to the individual choice, the intention behind it and the danger which exists in our attachment to categories which make the world easier to polarise and divide. What neither tradition asks me to do is to pretend that states, histories or collective patterns aren't important, nor do they require some kind of artificial middle ground where all ideas and actions are equal and where we are all equally responsible for them. What both ask, which is substantially more difficult, is that I always begin by seeing the individual standing in front of me rather than boxing them into a stereotype based on the nation they happen to have been born into.

Except that this becomes considerably harder when the society itself is part of what I am trying to understand.

It would be easy enough for me to make the argument that the nationality of an individual tells me nothing about them, if I also believed that the society they were from had nothing to do with shaping them. But I don’t. Israel has mandatory military service for almost all Jewish citizens. They also have a State education system which teaches a particular version of their national story and history, as well as a media environment which shapes what the Israeli population knows about the actions and conflicts being conducted in their name. In the same way that Chinese state control of education and media means that many Chinese people grow up without knowledge of Tiananmen Square, many Israelis who I have seen sharing their perspectives in social media threads seem to genuinely believe that their country was attacked by Iran, rather than it being Israel and the USA who instigated the current war in the region.

Then we have the domestic support for government policies imposed upon Palestinians, Gaza and the West Bank. While recent polling data after 2025 is difficult to find, reporting and analysis from within Israel shows that there is very little sympathy for Palestinians among much of the Israeli population. When large majorities of the citizenry supports policies and actions which I find inhumane and abhorrent, I personally find it very difficult to simply wave that away, even though acknowledging it makes my commitment to seeing individuals much more complicated. This is why Mandela’s observation works in both directions. People are human beings and are also the product of the societies which bring them up.

Despite this, I also believe that being produced by something is not the same thing as being determined or defined by it.

In amongst everything I have been reading about Israel and Gaza, there are also stories about Israelis who stand up to their government, often at huge personal cost. They refuse military service and burn their draft cards in protest of the atrocities committed in Gaza. They gather to protest the occupation and to demand a different future for Palestinians and Israelis. Their numbers are small in comparison to those who support the dominant political consensus and I am wary of conflating their minority into some kind of falsely equivalent comfort blanket which might make the bigger picture easier for us to cope with, however I am also fiercely determined that they will not become more forgotten voices in this fight against the genocide. Many of them have gone to jail as a consequence for holding firm to their beliefs. Others have faced estrangement from their families and communities who regard their resistance as betrayal, rather than as an act of moral conscience.

What matters to me most about this section of Israeli society is not that they represent some fantastical version of Israel which somehow absolves the rest, but rather that these people were raised within the same schools, the same systems and the same national stories as those who made the choice to support and participate in a genocide against their neighbours.

Whatever it was that shaped the majority, it shaped them too.

At some point however, the same society which shaped them also offered up a choice, and they chose differently. Maybe that choice came in the form of their military summons, perhaps it was something they witnessed, or a conversation which they had that made holding onto a story they’d been taught impossible to reconcile or sustain. Whatever that moment for each of them looked like, saying no carried a cost which they decided was worth bearing in order for them to hold on to their humanity.

For me, this is where the distinction between choice and circumstance begins to matter. It is abundantly clear that closed information environments can explain why people hold the beliefs they do. North Korea provides an almost perfect example of this. A national education system which indoctrinates young minds into believing a specific version of history can make false narratives incredibly difficult to recognise, let alone let go of. Our own education systems in Australia provide ample evidence of this when it comes to how little we know about our First Peoples and the history of colonial settlement at home. Compulsory service can explain why people join the military, and propaganda can help us to understand why some ideas like apartheid can look monstrous to those outside of it, while appearing totally normal from within. None of these explanations are without meaning. Sincerity in a system of belief is not the same as innocence - but it is not nothing either.

The environments we grow up in tell us a lot about how our beliefs come to exist, but what interests me far more is what happens when those beliefs finally collide with a choice.

The problem with this of course, is that none of it is visible to me when I first meet someone. The Israeli I end up sitting next to at the beach bar on Samui could have been recently serving in the IDF, be the number one fan of Netanyahu and believe to their core, that Palestinians should be expelled from the West Bank. On the other hand, they may have burned their draft card, emigrated to escape their home country and experienced ostracisation and banishment from friends and family because they refused to participate in something they believe is wrong. Most likely, their story sits somewhere far less extreme between these two examples, but the point is, I can’t tell any of this from their accent, their religion or the passport they happen to carry.

Now I could try to solve this ambiguity by asking them straight up about where they stand on all of this; there is nothing inherently wrong about being curious about someone’s politics, their military service or how they perceive their own country if these things arise naturally in a conversation. What disturbs me is the idea that anyone should be required to provide satisfactory answers to those questions before I make a decision about how I am going to treat them. When we approach people this way, we’re no longer approaching them with curiosity. Instead, we are expecting them to be personally accountable for the actions of their State without having any evidence which shows that its actions are also theirs.

This is something I have also seen escalating in online environments. I can read a thread in which I largely agree with the political position being argued, only to find myself feeling genuinely disturbed by the language being directed at, or used to describe, the Israelis themselves. None of this excuses the actions of Israelis who have committed atrocities over many years. However, the minute we begin reducing an entire population of people into one monolithic entity, assuming they share one brain, one mind, a single morality and collective guilt, we lose the individual entirely.

This kind of dehumanisation is deeply distasteful to me, even when I agree with the cause being defended by the people who engage in it. I have always believed that we disagree with ideas and hold people accountable for their actions, rather than allowing either of these to become an excuse for denying the humanity of the person responsible for them. Both Ubuntu and Buddhism reinforce this idea for me. Neither asks me to respect every belief simply because someone holds it, nor to forgive every action which causes harm, which is a relief, as there are ideas that I find morally indefensible and actions which I believe deserve universal condemnation. What both ask of me is that I resist the temptation to turn my condemnation of those ideas and actions into a judgement of the inherent humanity of a person who holds or commits them.

This distinction matters in the opposite direction too. Spending an evening interacting with a warm, funny and totally likeable Israeli does not cancel out or alter my understanding of what’s going on in Gaza. Pleasant encounters do not provide evidence against a body count, and the humanity of a few lovely individuals does not make the actions of their State any less abhorrent, just as the actions of their State do not make them any less human.

An important example of this can be seen in the relationship that developed between Nelson Mandela and his prison guard, Christo Brand. Brand was only nineteen years old when he arrived at Robben Island prison. He was a young, white Afrikaner who had grown up within South Africa’s system of apartheid, before putting on the uniform of the State which imprisoned Mandela. Despite the enormous power imbalance which existed between the two of them, Mandela refused to allow himself to define the young man who guarded him by his uniform, his race or what he represented through his job alone.

Over the years, the two of them got to know one another and ended up developing a relationship which the system they both existed within was explicitly designed to prohibit. Mandela encouraged and helped Brand with his studies, while Brand smuggled him bread. He also found other small ways to extend kindness to his prisoner, helping Mandela to preserve some degree of dignity and freedom while imprisoned in one of the harshest jails on earth. Brand even managed to smuggle in one of Mandela’s grandchildren so he could hold him! The relationship formed by the two men in prison survived well beyond, and both remained friends long after Mandela walked free in 1990.

What is significant to me about this relationship is that Mandela didn’t need to pretend that the uniform worn by Brand represented nothing, in order for him to push past it and see the individual who wore it. Brand was still working for the apartheid state, a system which Mandela had spent his entire life working to dismantle. The kindness that Brand showed Mandela didn’t make the system of apartheid any less inhumane, just as the friendship and affection he felt towards Brand couldn’t change the fact that his imprisonment was wildly unjust. However, Mandela was able to hold both truths at once, without ever letting them diminish his own humanity in the process. That he managed this while surviving the dehumanisation the apartheid state was designed to impose upon him, is in itself, astounding.

While I personally love the story of Mandela and his prison guard, there is also a limit to what their story can help me comprehend. Brand was working within the apartheid system, but he was not responsible for it and his acts of kindness and humanity towards Mandela show that he was more than willing to push against the expectations of the role which his uniform dictated. The question I have been grappling with becomes considerably more complicated when it is turned towards people who actively participate in the violence that systems like apartheid make possible.

Rwanda sits at the far and terrible end of this question because what took place there over the course of just a few months in 1994 destroyed any comforting assumptions we might have about the capacity of ordinary people to commit horrific acts of violence against each other. In around one hundred days, hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and moderate Hutus were murdered. What makes the Rwandan genocide particularly chilling lies in both who was responsible and how they chose to murder their victims. Neighbours killed neighbours, husbands killed wives, family members were chased down and hacked to death by machetes. People who just days earlier had shared churches and streets, whose children had attended schools together, turned on one another almost overnight. It was an environment saturated with propaganda, organised incitement and the dehumanisation which painted one side of the population as the enemy.

The environment in which this genocide occurred matters enormously, because without understanding the context it becomes almost impossible to wrap our minds around how ordinary people can suddenly become participants in such a brutal and personal campaign of killing. State propaganda, ethnic identity, education, fear and organised incitement can quickly and profoundly change what people believe is normal, necessary and even righteous. History has shown us that the machinery does not need to mobilise an army of monsters to do its dirty work; ordinary people are perfectly adequate.

Yet not every Rwandan who was exposed to the heightened politics of the pre-genocidal environment responded by picking up a machete and murdering their neighbours. That reality matters.

It shows us that somewhere in amongst all the circumstances and the action, there was still a choice. Every time the person wielding their machete picked it up to use it, they made one. There were many others experiencing the same conditions who chose differently - some decided to hide neighbours, others helped people to escape and many also simply refused to participate. Circumstances can help us to understand and even in some cases, to make comprehensible, why people participate in atrocities such as those committed in Rwanda. However they do not make the fact that there is always a choice disappear.

There is something else I have had to admit to myself as I have been diving deeper into the complexity of this line of thinking. I don’t meet a Rwandan person of the generation which lived through the genocide and immediately wonder whether they picked up a machete. I don’t meet Americans and automatically hold them accountable for the countless wars their government has started, even if they have served in the military. Yet I have realised that I do respond differently to Israelis who I know, or suspect, have served in the IDF.

This is harder for me to admit than the assumptions themselves. When I meet young Israelis travelling overseas, I often assume, not entirely without reason given the numbers who flock to Thailand for their tiyul hagidol or ‘big trip’, that they’ve served in the IDF and I find myself avoiding them as a result. It isn’t because I am afraid of being wrong but that I am afraid of being right. If I discover that they have served, then I have an overwhelming visceral reaction which makes me want nothing more to do with them.

Even this reaction is unreliable and really doesn’t tell me what I think it does. I could rationalise it in so many ways, but the truth is that all it really tells me is that they have served. It doesn’t tell me where they served, what they did, what they witnessed, what they may have believed or felt while doing it or what they feel about it now. I may come to find that their actions really do make me want nothing further to do with them and if that is the case, then I reserve the right to make that judgement. What I am beginning to question is whether I have sometimes made it without giving the individual in front of me the benefit of the doubt.

This brings me once again to Ubuntu and the dharma, neither of which unfortunately provides me with an answer which is easy or comfortable. Seeing the humanity of an individual does not require me to forgive what they might have done. Having an understanding of the society which produced someone does not absolve the choices they subsequently make, just as recognising the extraordinary capacity of societies to shape people’s beliefs and actions does not grant me permission to decide what an individual may or may not have done before I know anything about them.

There is no neat middle position sitting between these ideas, and to be honest, I don’t think there should be.

There is enormous pressure to resolve this discomfort, particularly when talking about Israel and Palestine because so much of the conversation has become deeply polarised. There seems to be a pervasive belief that any kind of acknowledgement made in one direction must result in a concession being taken from the other. Yet if I am being honest with myself about why I have spent so much time thinking about this, it is because that pressure doesn’t only come from other people, I feel it within my own thinking too.

Understanding this intellectually is one thing, consistently practicing it is another challenge entirely. What I fear is not being wrong, or having to change my mind, but losing trust in my own thinking. I want to be able to look directly at evidence which is ugly, make judgements about what I see without apology while still being able to recognise when those judgements begin to creep further than the evidence allows.

I think that both Ubuntu and Buddhism, rather inconveniently, leave me with practice rather than resolution. I can understand how a society shapes a person without presuming that it has determined who they have become, and I can condemn what someone choses to do without deciding to strip them of their humanity in the process.

None of this feels especially settled to me, but that might actually be the point. These are all choices too, ones which I have to keep making if I want to genuinely honour what Mandela and so many of those who sought reconciliation after apartheid understood — genuine reconciliation becomes possible only after we find the individual inside all of the categories we have constructed around them, and see them in all their imperfection, as people just like ourselves.

Israel and Palestine are clearly nowhere near that point yet, but those of us watching from outside still have choices to make about whether our words and actions will help fuel the hatred or leave room for a different future. Mandela said, “You encourage people by seeing the good in them”. Perhaps seeing the humanity in people whose society I find abhorrent is not a concession at all, but one small way of refusing to let go of my own.

Quotes from Nelson Mandela and additional reference material on his experience in prison were taken from:

Mungi Ngomane, Everyday Ubuntu: Living Better Together, The African Way, Bantam Press, London UK, 2019

It’s funny when a thought that has been rolling around in your brain recently then happens to coincide with the learning that comes with beginning something new and seemingly unrelated. As I have been absorbing all the new information shared with me these past few weeks, I have been intrigued by the strong correlation which exists between the Buddhist idea of impermanence and the practice of writing itself… and a tension as well.

Every time I sit down to write, as each word lands on the page, it is already reflecting a version of me and of my thinking which has moved on. While I may continue to edit the piece, come back to it later and make revisions, or even at times remove or rewrite entire paragraphs or sections, by the time I publish and let it go, those thoughts and convictions I felt so strongly while I was writing each article have not stood still. That version of me and my thinking may remain and strengthen, however it can also totally change as I continue to learn. Regardless, the writing itself may stand as a lasting artifact of who I was in that moment, even as I continue to change.

The more I’ve thought about this idea of impermanence, the more I have wondered whether it applies just as strongly to the roles and identities that we each move through in the course of living our lives. In some contexts I am a teacher, in others I am a friend, a sister, an auntie or a daughter. At times, I adopt the role of a coach and mentor while at others I am a researcher and a writer. None of these identities becomes less authentic because I don’t inhabit them equally each day, nor does moving between them mean that one is ever fully discarded to make room for another. Like all of us, I simply inhabit different versions of myself which emerge through the different people, relationships and contexts I find myself in, and each of which is entirely real while I am living within it.

This same movement between roles has become especially relevant as I have begun learning about the Middle Way Framework for Buddhist education that we are using at school. The framework contains a key principle for teachers, asking us to move deliberately between two identities which we often treat as fixed, that before we can transmit something to our students, we first need to become students of it ourselves. More than simply being a foundational principle, it is an authentic invitation for educators to spend time engaging with ideas, playing with them, reflecting on our own experiences, questioning and wondering about them before we decide what we might offer to our students. Only after that engagement has happened are we asked to transmit what we have discovered to the children, carefully observing what they chose to do with it before rushing to any judgement or assumption about the understandings they might have gained.

There is something genuinely beautiful in this sequence, not least of which is that it asks us as teachers to let go of that title, even temporarily, and the certainty which often comes along with it. It is also a reminder that being the teacher doesn’t mean we hold all the knowledge or understanding in the room, any more than being the student means occupying a position of not knowing. Instead, to teach well and to teach with authenticity, we need to be capable of constantly moving between these two roles and allowing ourselves to inhabit each of them fully, rather than assuming that one carries the knowledge while the other simply receives it. It also means that curiosity and creativity are not qualities we as teachers need to abandon in order to be taken seriously; rather, they are treated as integral to the role itself.

This might be why this framework has landed with me at precisely the right moment in my life, because I am encountering Buddhist philosophy as a new teacher at a new school which is shaped by it, while knowing at the same time that I am very much a beginner when it comes to understanding the ideas themselves. In many ways, this piece is a reflection of exactly that. It is an unfinished thread of thinking written down anyway, because the act of writing is itself part of how my thinking happens, rather than a report or argument offered only once that thinking process is complete.

At the end of our first week of staff training, some of this thinking began to take on a different shape during an afternoon spent at Wat Bowonniwet, or Wat Bowon, a place which occupies an extraordinary position in the history of education in Thailand. Long before the emergence of a modern education system in this country, the temple was already a center of formal learning. It was not only home to Thailand’s first school and later, its first university, but also a place where the foundations of modern Thai education began to take shape, developing alongside Buddhist study rather than being treated as something separate from it.

Wat Bowon also holds enormous significance as one of Thailand’s most important royal temples. It was founded by King Mongkut (Rama IV) during his long period spent as a monk and has remained closely connected to the monarchy ever since. Its history as a place of learning was what made our visit especially significant though, as we had been invited to spend the afternoon thinking about education in a Buddhist context during an audience with Fra Anil Sakya. He is a senior monk at Wat Bowon and an educator whose own life and work extend far beyond the temple walls.

Over the three hours we spent with Fra Anil, he moved through stories drawn from very different parts of his life, including his own ability to move comfortably between identities which might appear contradictory to others. In Bangkok he is a Buddhist monk, while when he teaches at a University in America he also identifies as a Jesuit, seeing no special tensions between the two. Even the title he uses reflects this, with ‘Fra’ combining ‘Father’ and ‘Phra’, the two titles he inhabits in those different worlds.

Each story he shared was delivered with real warmth and a kind of humour which made our discussion lively, while never once puncturing the seriousness of what he was actually sharing with us. What stood out to me though, was not any single story, fascinating as most of them were, but the way authenticity itself seemed to be doing much of the teaching. Fra Anil did not spend his time with us performing spiritual seriousness for a bunch of visiting teachers; he was operating from within it, and the difference was obvious to me from the moment he began speaking.

This is something I believe exists in every great teacher-student relationship, because all students, regardless of our age, can tell the difference between a rule being handed down and a value being genuinely lived in front of us. Anyone who has worked with children will know that they are often the first to point out inconsistencies and moments of unfairness. We had actually spoken about this in our first week together as a team, considering things as trivial as what we teachers drink our coffee in. Carrying a branded cup into a room full of children who can not afford or access the same thing teaches a lesson far louder than any words about gratitude or privilege can undo. Pour it into a plain cup instead and that mismatch disappears. Nobody needs to explain why; it is the same principle I heard in Fra Anil’s words to us, only on a completely different scale. He reminded us that authenticity in teaching is not reserved for the profound moments, but is demanded just as much in the smaller and less obvious ones as well.

Most of what we spoke about that afternoon belongs to a private conversation and is not mine to retell, however one detail he shared with us belongs to the history of the temple itself while also leaning into a question which sits at the heart of our school — How can we modernise education without westernising it? In a short video outlining some of the significant features of Wat Bowon, we learned that the colour scheme in the main temple runs in a deliberately planned gradient. At the back of the temple, the walls and columns are painted black, indicating the state of least enlightenment. As you move towards the two enormous sitting Buddhas at the front, the shades become gradually lighter, symbolising a movement towards the highest state of enlightenment as you come closer to the Buddhas.

As Fra Anil guided us on a tour of the temple grounds, the afternoon culminated in a visit to the main ordination hall. Sitting on the floor in front of the Buddhas, he invited us to look at the back of the temple, to the enormous friezes representing the great powers of the world at the time that Wat Bowon was built. To the right, there were friezes painted in the popular European realism style of the day, showing images of Europeans in Victorian dress, astronomical details including constellations of stars and the sun, grand ships braving the high seas and even The White House, complete with George Washington. To the left we could see that Chinese-style art and imagery honoured the long-standing ties in both patronage and trade which existed between China and Siam, while a number of Chinese artifacts were also incorporated throughout the temple grounds.

What made me chuckle was the positioning of all this within the temple itself. King Mongkut, who not only founded the temple but also played an integral role in bringing the design of Wat Bowon to life, was an incredibly curious and intelligent man. He was himself a student of Western science, astronomy and languages and was not dismissive of the knowledge or ideas coming from other parts of the world. Yet here they all were, the Europeans, Americans and Chinese, given space on the walls of this important Buddhist temple, while also being placed firmly at the back, in the darkest part of the room and therefore, according to the design itself, occupying the space furthest from enlightenment.

I have no idea how much humour King Mongkut intended with this design but sitting there on the floor looking up at it, there was something almost playful about acknowledging these powerful cultures, learning from them and giving them a place in the temple, without ever suggesting that Thailand needed to place them at the center of its own story. I also had to laugh at where my own culture landed in this belief system, rather than feeling defensive or offended. Both of these cultural traditions have, in multiple moments throughout history, behaved as bullies on the world stage and I found it useful to be asked to consider them from a perspective in which neither sat at the center.

I believe that most of us spend far too little time trying to understand how the world looks from inside someone else’s framework, especially when that framework challenges the stories and histories that we tell about ourselves. Being able to sit in that temple, considering the worldview of a culture different to my own and finding truth within it, rather than defending or rationalising my own corner, felt like a genuinely important lesson in what it means to truly become a student of something. It occurred to me that learning requires more than curiosity alone; it also asks us to be willing to loosen our grip on what we already think we know, long enough to see what someone else can show us.

This has also made me think differently about some of what I have been learning about over the past year. Many of the Indigenous philosophies, traditions and beliefs I have encountered understand spirit and relationship as running through everything — land, ancestors, the living and the dead. Much of my own thinking is anchored in Ubuntu, the idea that your humanity and my own are inextricably bound to one another. Then comes Buddhism, teaching something which sounds, on the surface, remarkably similar. Interconnectedness is the thread I can see running through all three, with each challenging, in different ways, the idea that anything in our world exists entirely on its own.

Where the three diverge, however, is in the roads which lead to that shared idea and what each system asks of us once we arrive at it.

My very basic understanding of Buddhist thought is this: the self is not seen as something fixed and permanent. Who we are is always changing, shaped by our experiences, relationships, circumstances and everything that has happened before. If we start with an acknowledgement that change is inevitable, then trying to hold ourselves, other people and even moments in time exactly as they are becomes impossible. Letting go then, is not about pretending that something does not matter or even about forcing ourselves not to care about it. Instead it teaches us to accept that nothing can ever remain exactly as it once was.

Ubuntu reaches the idea of interconnectedness from a different starting point. The idea expressed through umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, often translated as “a person is a person through other people”, is that our humanity is formed in relationship with others. I can not fully become who I am in isolation and then step out into the world to form connections with other people. The relationships with those around me are already a part of what makes me who I am. My family, my community, the people who have taught me, loved me, challenged me or cared for me have all participated in the creation of the person I am in this moment. Relationships may change and people may come in and out of our lives, or even die, but what has been shared between us never simply vanishes because that connection is altered. Some part of them will always remain a part of me.

What I have been learning from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ways of knowing stretches my understanding of interconnectedness even further. There is no single First Peoples belief system, and what I have encountered represents only a tiny fraction of what is an enormously complex and diverse collection of cultures across Australia. One idea which I have encountered repeatedly however, is that relationship does not only exist between living things. Country is not simply land which people live upon, ancestors are not only humans who have lived in the past, and the natural world is not just a pretty backdrop against which human life unfolds. All of these things exist within continuing relationships, each of which carries responsibilities across generations. From within that understanding, the past is not really “past” in the way many of us have been taught how to think about it. What came before is never really gone as it lives on through Country, story, kinship, obligation and the people who are living here and now.

This is where a question I have been pondering for a while now — How does Buddhism intersect with Indigenous ways of knowing? — has become a much deeper and more interesting inquiry for me. I arrived at each system of belief already carrying Ubuntu with me, and with a belief that we are made through our relationships with other people. Those relationships do not simply disappear when circumstances change or someone is no longer physically present, because I hold them within me. Maybe this is why I find myself so interested in what happens when I place that understanding alongside Buddhist impermanence and First Peoples understandings of continuity.

I can see interconnectedness running through all three, but once that idea meets memory, time and loss, each system of belief takes a very different path. I am not convinced that these differences need to be resolved and in fact, I believe that trying to force them together to make a puzzle that somehow fits is completely missing the point. Right now, what fascinates me is how I myself am drawn to and agree with so many aspects of each system of belief, while also wrestling with the tensions that emerge when I place them alongside each other.

Going back to our afternoon of learning at Wat Bowon, there was one thing Fra Anil said which has lingered, especially when I return to the thought which began this piece — the idea that my writing captures something true about who I am and what I believe in at the moment that I write it, while knowing it can never continue to reflect the person I am becoming. That my published words remain static while the person I am does not. Fra Anil spoke to us about mindfulness and contemplation as ways of looking back at what we carry from the past into the present, while learning how to recognise what is still useful to us and what we might simply be holding onto out of habit. The point, as I understood it, was not to forget what has already gone before or the ways these experiences have shaped us, but to become more thoughtful about what we carry forward and how we use it. What remains useful can help each of us to make better decisions and create better outcomes, both for ourselves and for the people around us.

I began this piece already a few days behind the thinking that has ultimately produced it, and as I conclude it, I am finishing it in much the same place. This does not mean that the writing I started with has become in any way less true simply because I have changed since I wrote the first draft, and yet I also know that I don’t need to hold onto every thought shared here or expect that it remains true in exactly the same way forever. This piece, like all the others, has become one artifact in the collection of my own process of becoming.

I am also genuinely enjoying being invited to really embody the role of the student in relation to everything I have explored here, and I hope that I will remember to remain one even as my confidence builds and some of these new ideas begin to find their way into my practice as a teacher. A friend reminded me this week that knowledge itself is infinite. This means there is always another perspective to consider, another idea which shifts or challenges something I once thought I understood or new understandings that alter and complicate the stories which feel familiar and comfortable. Maybe that is the entire point. Interconnectedness might show us that everything is linked, but those links are not fixed either. They shift and change over time and so do the meanings we make from them and the ways we learn to understand ourselves within them. My thinking will change too, and rather than seeing that as somehow undermining what I have written before, I am beginning to see that change itself is part of the process.

In a somewhat “first world problems” kind of way, I actually had not been looking forward to it at all. This was only because on the other side of it, I would be launching straight back into full-time work after a year of being away from the classroom and making my own schedule, so I’d have preferred to be at home getting myself prepared for the change ahead. However needing to enter on a new visa from outside of Thailand, and after weeks of humming and ho’ing about where to go I chose HCMC for two reasons: firstly, because it was an affordable place to spend two weeks, a major consideration after a year without a regular salary, but second, because it’s the last big city in Vietnam that I had not truly explored.

This is not to say that I wasn’t looking forward to being in Vietnam. Rather, it was that when I visit a city with so much history, I usually feel compelled to turn my tourist dial all the way up and really make the most of the experience. Tours, famous historical sites, places I had long wanted to visit after reading about them in the history books and watching documentaries since I studied Vietnam War history at university. They were all stacked up waiting for me, and all of a sudden they felt a little onerous.

As I arrived and embarked upon my first genuine tourist experience in Vietnam, being massively ripped off by an airport taxi driver, I realised how silly and spoiled all this thinking sounded. There was actually no need to do any of it if I didn’t feel like it and once I acknowledged this, and handed over two days worth of budget to my driver, I immediately felt happier. From that point on, I set about spending my days simply walking around and experiencing Saigon by being present within it.

The trip began, and will end, in District One. This part of HCMC sits right at the center of life here and is where many of the most famous tourist spots are located. The first nine nights, I stayed on a street near the river, which was extremely local. As we pulled up at the small, family-run guesthouse at one end of Co Giang Street, I looked around and smiled at the scene before me.

The street was chaotic with motorbikes, cars, bicycles, food trollies and pedestrians all vying for position. The pavements were rarely free for people to walk, pushing all activity out onto the street itself, which could not have been more than five meters wide. Despite the street being chock-full of action, there was an almost organised rhythm to it all - a method to the madness you might say.

The buildings lining Co Giang were narrow and tall, faced with balconies that often had colourful lines of laundry strung across them, drying in the ever-present breeze. Others were adorned with strings of fairy lights and lanterns, overflowing greenery and vines growing thick to provide a little privacy and to stave off the heat of the sun. One even had the sound of a karaoke machine blaring, which seemed to have taken the place of the rooster in this village, since Vietnamese music started early each morning and would continue well into the evenings.

To my delight, my room had its own balcony complete with a table and chair. I spent several evenings sitting outside reading, writing and watching the scenes of everyday life unfold on the street below. Over the course of my stay on Co Giang, I came to know several of the street’s inhabitants as I gradually became a recognisable and accepted figure in their world.

There was the sweet lady who ran the guesthouse, Ngan. Upon first meeting her, she engaged in the ritual I have come to expect as a traveler in most South East Asian countries: Where are you from? How old are you? Are you married? Children? What do you do for work?

To many travelers from western countries, these questions can feel intrusive and even a little rude, however after fifteen years of living in Thailand, I recognised this as curiosity and the way people here get to know those of us who visit.

When I told her that I am a teacher, she burst into a smile which lit up her already twinkling eyes, enthusiastically shook my hand, before turning to relay this information to her staff in Vietnamese. Each of the ladies in the office nodded and smiled at me, and for the rest of my stay I was greeted with “Good morning Teacher!”

In front of the house next door, a man slept rough on the front stoop. From the first day he had greeted me with a smile and, despite his limited English, always came to say hello when he saw me coming or going. This small ritual quickly became a treasured part of each day there.

As I observed the goings-on of the street from my balcony, I noticed that he was always busying himself with the day-to-day interactions he had with everyone around the guesthouse. Although homeless, the people in this little community clearly took care of him quite well. He was fed by the woman who owned the house he slept in front of, and I’d often see her pop her head out to have a chat as she handed him some food or a bottle of water. Ngan told me that he was “not well in his mind” but that the people of the street did what they could to help him by making sure both he and his clothes were clean and that he did not go hungry.

When I eventually left Co Giang, he helped carry my bags out to the taxi and even gave me a little hug. I felt genuinely sad to say wave goodbye.

On the other side of the street, an elderly lady would be wheeled outside each afternoon by a slightly younger woman who, I was informed by the owner of the nearby banh mi stand, was her daughter-in-law. My homeless friend would often wander over to check on her and gently move her wheelchair when he noticed the sun beginning to lick at her feet. Later on as the afternoon air cooled, her daughter would bring a stool and sit beside her as they chatted and watched the neighbourhood activity carrying on around them.

After a few days they started waving whenever they saw me. We’d exchange smiles, greetings of xin chào and the occasional moment of laugher despite none of us speaking the other’s language.

The neighbourhood gradually revealed itself as I spent hours walking through the alleys and getting lost down laneways which make up so much of Ho Chi Minh City. Groups of men gathered as the afternoons slipped into evening, drinking coffee and smoking on street corners or congregating beside the river where they gambled on the pavements, hidden behind curtains of parked motorbikes. The women meanwhile, seemed far less visible. They busied themselves with children, washed dishes in large basins of soapy water on the street or simply staying inside their houses.

It was a pattern that I recognise from Bangkok too. The caring work of Co Giang seemed largely the domain of women, while the leisure belonged more often to the men. Whether this pattern I had been noticing reflected reality or was simply what I had happened to observe over the time spent in the neighbourhood, I couldn’t say for sure. It simply became one of those unobtrusive details which, like a seed, planted itself in my brain.

It was while I was walking through the streets leading up to Ben Thanh Market one afternoon that I first crossed paths with Elias. We met each other’s eyes at a traffic light and smiled, only to run into one another again about an hour later as I walked out of the old Saigon Post Office and turned right into Book Street.

As I raised my camera to take a photograph of the bookstores lining this little walking street, I paused for a moment as someone walked into the frame, before realising it was the same man I had smiled at while crossing the street earlier. Once again we smiled and he came over and introduced himself. We then stood chatting for over an hour before finding a local brewery where we spent the rest of the evening enjoying several excellent beers and an even better conversation.

It was his first trip to Asia, so he was understandably curious about everything around him. I enjoyed being able to share some of the knowledge I had accumulated over fifteen years of living and traveling in this part of the world. Normally people’s eyes glaze over when I start to talk about the history of Southeast Asia. Elias however, was genuinely interested, not only in seeing the region beyond the tourist trail, but also in learning more about its people and history. He had booked a trip to the Cu Chi Tunnels the next morning, something I had also planned on doing but as it turned out, never did.

The next day, I visited the War Remnants Museum, which honestly might not have been the wisest place to begin my tourist trail through Saigon. It brought all the horror that this country and its people have endured at the hands of foreign occupiers rushing back, including, to my chagrin, the role played by members of my own country’s armed forces.

None of the information presented there was new to me, having studied the three colonial wars at university years ago, yet I was immediately depressed by the images of children who suffered the consequences of Agent Orange and napalm. Feeling overcome with emotion, I could not help drawing parallels with the current situation in Gaza, and in that moment, I realised I needed to leave.

I think, in the end, that experience killed my desire to visit the tunnels, on this trip anyway.

Instead I found myself wondering whether I had simply had enough of walking through the stories of history dominated by men. As I looked at photographs of Southern Vietnamese military men alongside white French and American officers sitting around discussing how to “perfect methods of torture”, I caught myself thinking: How does somebody arrive at a table like this?

All this was compounded by the fact that, on my first day in Ho Chi Minh City, I had purchased a translated copy of The Green Lotus Bud, a hagiographical novel written by Vietnamese author Son Tung, chronicling the early life of Ho Chi Minh. This book had already punctuated my conversation with Elias on Book Street. I remember telling him that despite everything that I had learned about Vietnam’s history over the years, I knew remarkably little about the man whose presence here is literally everywhere.

Reading it gave me a deeper appreciation for the collectivism that underpins life in Vietnam and yet, despite the presence of women consistently shaping the person ‘Uncle Ho’ became, as teachers, companions and family members, it was also impossible not to notice how deeply gendered those relationships remained.

The book also gave me a more nuances appreciation for the role of teachers and intellectuals in Vietnamese society, which went a long way towards explaining why everyone I met seemed delighted to learn that I’m a teacher. Knowing this, I found myself steering conversations towards my profession rather than my marital status which, as a female solo traveler with no children, still makes me something of a curiosity here. Vietnamese people often scrunch up their faces in confusion when I tell them I have neither husband nor children. It’s not an unfamiliar reaction, the Thais are very similar.

Towards the end of my trip, having spent a fairly frugal week and a half, I decided to embrace a different part of the city’s history and splurge on a few nights at the Hotel Continental Saigon.

The the oldest hotel in Ho Chi Minh City, it was built during the French colonial period. Despite sitting in the same district as my first guesthouse, it felt like it was in another world entirely.

When checking in, I had the delightful surprise of being offered an upgrade to a “bigger, famous room”. As I walked alongside the hotel porter towards Room 214, which sat at the end of a long, high-ceilinged corridor, he turned to me with a smile.

“Very famous room!” he announced proudly. “Do you know the author Graham Greene?”

Standing outside the door, he pointed at the photographs and information mounted on the wall about Greene and The Quiet American, parts of which had been filmed in Lam Son Square and along the terrace cafe outside the hotel.

“He stayed here and wrote his book The Quiet American. Do you know it?”

I admitted that I did, but that I had not read it in over twenty years.

“Maybe time to read it again!” he declared with a nod, before opening the door to the stately corner room where I would spend my final few nights.

Once he had departed, I opened the door and stepped out onto the balcony, feeling like a child on Christmas morning. I thought about all the people who had stood and looked out at the view before me. Hunter S. Thompson documented the end stages of the Vietnam War here in 1975. Rabindranath Tagore, Jacques Chirac and Mahathir Mohamed and Anthony Bourdain had all slept beneath these ceilings.

By this stage, Elias had moved on from visiting Cambodia and was now exploring Bangkok. Although our time in Saigon had only overlapped for two days, we’d continued chatting as we each made our way on our adventures, comparing notes on the places we’d visited, the people we’d met and what each of us was discovering along the way. I sent him a photograph of the view from my new room overlooking the Saigon Opera house and the Caravelle Hotel, made famous by the journalists, diplomats and spies who had lived and worked there during the Vietnam War.

“It doesn’t even look like Saigon,” was his reply.

I had to laugh.

He wasn’t wrong.

Feeling like something I owed to the room, I found a copy of The Quiet American through the American Library archives and read it again.

As I read, I realised that rather than Fowler and Pyle, it was the Vietnamese character Phuong who unsettled me the most. She stuck out in the same way that another character, Út Huệ has done while I was reading The Green Lotus Bud.

Both novels were products of their time and based on events that had taken place decades, even more than a century, earlier. Even allowing for that, I couldn’t stop thinking about the women whose lives sat just beyond the stories I had alwats been taught.

There is a moment in The Quiet American when Fowler asks Pyle whether he has ever thought to ask Phuong what she actually wants, as they discuss trading her between them as if she were an object rather than a human being. I found it one of the most perplexing exchanges in the novel, and also one of the most hypocritical, as Fowler assumes he already knows the answer without ever having asked her himself.

Then came his patronising speech about Vietnamese women not loving in the same way “we” do, and I had to stop and roll my eyes.

I stopped reading and reflected for a moment that perhaps men have never really understood how women have experienced the world we all share, because so much of the history has been written through their eyes. I wondered what I might say to Greene were he sitting beside me on the balcony of Room 214 and how he might defend the amazingly reductive stereotype of Vietnamese womanhood he had created in Phuong.

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Between these two novels written by men and about men, I had also picked up a copy of The Women by Kristin Hannah and devoured it over a single day as it rained on and off from morning until night.

I had wandered up the nine flights of stairs inside the Cafe Apartments on Nguyễn Huệ and found a spot on the balcony of the Good Day Cafe right up the top, where I sat drinking coffee, reading and watching dark grey rain clouds roll slowly across the city. They brought with them cool winds and steady rain, cementing my decision to stay exactly where I was.

To say the book was intense is an understatement.

It reminded me of how thoroughly women have been erased from the familiar narratives of historical events. My entire history degree is full of the writing of white men. Rarely was I asked to read history through the perspectives of women, colonised peoples or others whose voices have been consistently marginalised or omitted altogether.

Over the past year, this has been an imbalance I have consciously tried to correct. The Unlearning Project itself has become part of that process as I have documented my own attempts to rethink history, education, media and political decision-making.

It seems quite fitting that this trip, coming right at the end of my year-long sabbatical, has been laced with stories that have also become part of that journey.

I had carrived in Vietnam expecting to spend two weeks revisiting the familiar stories of the wars that shaped this country and while they have featured along the way, what I ended up being far more intrigued by was the people, and specifically the women, whose stories seem to exist just beyond them.

I thought once again of Út Huệ, and of all of the women Sơn Tùng surrounds Ho Chi Minh with right throughout his early life. After finishing the book and feeling curious to know what became of her after Ho left for France, I visited more than a dozen bookshops asking whether anyone knew of a book about her.

I have not been able to find a single one.

The Women, a fictional story about Frankie, an American nurse positioned at a field hospital in Northern Vietnam describes her experiences of the horror and proximity of war as she serves two tours. The book made me think of Australian journalist Kate Webb who is mentioned briefly in its pages.

About a year ago I came across You Don’t Belong Here in a Bangkok bookshop. It tells the stories of Webb and two other remarkable women, French photojournalist Catherine Leroy and American journalist Frances FitzGerald, each of whom reported from Vietnam during the war.

Their stories, particularly Webb’s, felt even more poignant as I sit here writing at the desk in Room 214. I have watched several short documentaries about war reporting from the famous Saigon hotels of the Vietnam War era over the past few days, and not once have I heard the name of a female correspondent mentioned.

Webb, who famously broke the story of the Viet Cong attack on the US Embassy and was later taken hostage by North Vietnamese forces while reporting in Cambodia once said:

“People always think I must be tough to survive all this. But I’m a real softie. But maybe that’s what it takes, you have to be soft to survive. Hard people shatter.”

This is one of the most honest things I have ever read from a war correspondent.

In my book, Webb deserves to be someone whose name is as recognisable as Arnett, Halberstam, Sheehan or Safer. It has only been recently that her story has started to receive the recognition it deserves.

Unlike the better-known male correspondents of her time, Webb stayed in cheap hotels and apartments while reporting from the UPI headquarters just off Rue Catinat, from the same building where the final evacuations of US personnel took place as the American war ended in 1975.

Also unlike the men, she didn’t live life in Saigon like it was the pages of a Graham Greene novel. Instead she quietly donated money to the local poor, used her income to purchase food for those in need and paid for the education of children. One detail which undoubtedly raised more than a few eyebrows, and which for some reason absolutely tickles me, is that she was famous at her local opium den.

While most people will have never heard of Webb, she is mentioned in The Women, which is one of the only novels I have read that places women’s experiences at the center of the Vietnam War. Like so many non-fiction accounts before it, the dominant narrative had long been that women simply weren’t there, despite the thousands who served as nurses, advisors, journalists and in a number of other roles.

Now, as this trip comes to an end, I am left with a humbling appreciation for how my own perception of this place and it’s history has deepened.

Instead of spending two weeks retracing the footsteps of the men whose names have dominated my understanding of Vietnam and who were often responsible for creating so much of the chaos and destruction that happened here, I am now leaving with a deep appreciation for the importance of the many unheard and as yet undiscovered histories of those whose stories have been pushed to the edges.

I think about Ngan, who proudly introduced me to her staff as “Teacher” and smile as I see the women of Co Giang in my mind, who seemed to be the glue holding together the life of the neighbourhood I watched unfolding around me each day. I remember my homeless friend, who never seemed to lack for conversation, food or kindness because the people in his community refused to let him disappear.

Út Huệ, Phuong, Frankie and Kate Webb have all also played important roles in this journey as their stories have sparked different questions about the history of Vietnam from the ones I arrived with two weeks ago. Most importantly, my own experiences of traveling solo as a woman here have underpinned my journey each step of the way.

It has helped me to understand better how women often live their lives on the edges and in the shadows here and why, even as Ho Chi Minh City modernises alongside the lives of it's people, to many of the Vietnamese people I encounter I am still a puzzle to be solved. In one conversation with Elias, where I shared how many strangers, most of them men, seem to stop me in the street for a chat, I asked him, “Does this not happen to you too?”

His reply was simply, “It’s different when you’re a man, I think.”

I couldn’t have said it better.

Further reading - books I have referenced in this piece

• Elizabeth Becker, You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War (2021)

• Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955)

• Kristin Hannah, The Women (2024)

• Sơn Tùng, The Green Lotus Bud (English translation by Nguyễn An Lý, 2023)

Over and over again, I see versions of the same accusation - teachers should be grateful. What I rarely see amongst these dogmatic refrains is any genuine sense of curiosity about why tens of thousands of teachers across the state have reached a point where industrial action feels like it’s one of the last available options for having their needs, and the needs of their students, met. Meaningful, empathetic conversation about what teachers are asking for and why has largely been absent from the media and from our leaders' remarks. That absence is starting to feel like the real story.

Imagine telling firefighters to be grateful they have hoses so they can put out fires, telling nurses to be grateful they have hospital beds for their patients or telling police to be grateful that they’re only assaulted on the job occasionally. Yet when teachers ask for manageable workloads, safer classrooms or enough time to prepare lessons, the words that get reached for tend to be along the lines of greedy or entitled.

As someone who has been teaching for nearly twenty years, I can say with total confidence that the job we do today is vastly different to the profession which many people think they know. Like most other professions, teaching requires a four-year degree and shoulders an enormous amount of responsibility, yet very little of that training actually prepares you for the reality of the job. Teacher education focuses on curriculum, pedagogy and classroom management, but nothing quite equips us for what happens when a hoard of children carrying all the hallmarks of societies’ fractures come walking through the door every morning.

Children don't exist in a vacuum. They absorb the pressures of the households and communities they come from - the financial strain, the family breakdowns, the mental health struggles, the disconnection - and they bring all of it into the classroom with them. Schools have increasingly become places where society expects every problem it doesn't know how to solve to be managed, and the gap between what training prepares you for and what the job actually demands may be one of the biggest reasons so many teacher decide to leave the profession early. Teachers qualify to become educators, but on top of that, we are also now expected to be counsellors, social workers, behaviour specialists, child protection reporters, administrators and crisis managers, with all of these roles often playing out in the course of a single school day.

Much of the work involved in accomplishing the mountain of tasks thrown our way is invisible and out of necessity, happens after the school day has ended. Planning, assessment, reporting, emails, parent communication, professional learning, compliance, data entry, behaviour documentation, mandatory training, meetings, excursions, camps and extracurricular supervision all sit outside the hours we’re paid for, and the overwhelming majority of this work is not only expected, but it’s treated as though it simply comes with the territory of being a teacher.

When teachers talk about unpaid overtime, many people respond that other professions work overtime too, and they’re right. The difference is that in teaching, overtime is no longer the exception. It has increasingly become the expectation, because the work we need to do to actually accomplish the objectives of our job simply doesn’t fit inside the hours we are paid to work each week. Nor are teachers being paid like many of the professionals we’re often compared with. While project managers, consultants and corporate executives may occasionally work long hours, they are generally paid far higher salaries to compensate for this. Teachers, meanwhile, navigate the same cost-of-living pressures as everyone else while routinely buying classroom resources with our own money and donating countless unpaid hours just so that their schools continue to function.

In addition to this is the reality that teaching remains a predominantly female profession. For many women, the unpaid work doesn’t end when they leave school. It just changes location, with lesson planning squeezed in between dinner, laundry, caring-for-children responsibilities and everything else that keeps a household running. The question isn’t whether teachers work hard enough, but whether the people responsible for educating the future generation of leaders and thinkers in this country should have to keep carrying a workload that increasingly relies on goodwill, instead of sustainable design.

If the only way that a professional can complete the work required by their contract is to work another twelve hours on average across evenings and on weekends, that isn’t a display of dedication, nor is it out of the goodness of our hearts. Rather it’s a symptom of a system that is fundamentally broken, one that we as a society keep meeting with a collective shrug, as though our children simply aren't worth the investment of getting this right.

None of this assumes every teacher or educator is drowning in the same way or to the same degree, however escalating violence, complex trauma, chronic staff shortages and rising parent aggression aren’t isolated stories passed around in staffrooms to elicit a sympathetic response. These stories are now common enough across the profession that they deserve to be treated as a pattern rather than an anecdote.

What has also been incredibly frustrating throughout this dispute is the way much of the media has framed it almost entirely around pay, as though teachers simply decided to strike for a bigger paycheck. It is an extraordinarily narrow and, in my opinion, dishonest way to report on what is, in reality, a much larger conversation about the future of education in our state. The workload issues, the increasing complexity of student needs, the rising incidence of violence, chronic teacher and support staff shortages, administrative demands that continue to grow alongside the reality that our jobs can no longer be completed within paid hours, are all aspects of this story which have been discussed. Yet even when these issues are reported, all too often they’re framed as evidence that it’s the schools who are failing, when instead we should be asking why schools are increasingly expected to carry the consequences of wider social, economic and political failures.

While the media was framing the dispute for the public, the Department of Education was busy doing the same for Victorian teachers. In the days before members voted, the department wrote to principals, teachers and education support staff describing its revised offer as the best combined pay and conditions package of any public school workforce in the country, while encouraging employees to accept it. The letter also noted that, under the Fair Work Act, any further delay would make it unlikely that additional salary could be secured this year. Whatever the department intended by including that statement, it read less like neutral information and more like a thinly-veiled threat: vote yes now or risk losing your pay increase. For an employer to communicate that message to its workforce just days before a ballot that was supposed to reflect the free and genuine views of its employees is, in my opinion, extraordinary.

The union’s response only underscored how predictable that message truly was. Members were urged not to allow the possibility of delayed pay increases to influence their vote, a position that took on added significance once the department’s email arrived. Whether that sequence was intentional or not, it reinforced the sense that this dispute had become as much about shaping the narrative as it was about negotiating an agreement which would actually improve conditions for both staff and students in our schools.

Meanwhile, a rank-and-file strike committee within the AEU has proposed that sub-branches commit to a third strike day on the 4th of August if the government has not returned with a satisfactory offer by the 30th of July, with further escalation proposed beyond that, including a strike every pay cycle and potentially culminating in a 48-hour walkout. Regardless of whether these proposals become official union policy, I believe that they say something profound about how far beyond the point of frustration many teachers have been pushed. People, and teachers in particular, do not tend to organise repeated, unpaid industrial actions because greed suddenly feels like a more exciting option than going to work. They do it because they believe the government is completely disinterested in really listening to their pleas for long overdue and desperately needed reform.

What's significant in all this, is what that committee is actually asking for beyond the widely reported pay increases. They are calling for staged reductions to class sizes with an enforceable cap, a hard limit on meeting hours, paid lunch breaks for education support staff and a commitment to fund schools to a minimum standard without further delay. Some of these broader demands have made it into the coverage I've read. Workload, underfunding and the exclusion of support staff from earlier offers have all been identified as key reasons that members rejected the original offer put forth by government. What is far less visible is any kind of nuanced discussion around why these specific requests have been made. The public debate has mostly focused on whether teachers have been offered enough money. The debate within the profession has been whether the agreement addresses the problems that brought teachers to the point of striking in the first place.

When the vote on the government’s revised offer came back, just over half of members rejected it. A result that close is not evidence of a profession being unreasonable. It is the mark of one that is genuinely divided over whether even a fairly substantial pay increase can fix what is actually broken in our schools.

The pay offer at the centre of all this, a 28.3 per cent increase over four years, sounds pretty good when all broader context is stripped away. I think it’s worth comparing that figure against a Victorian MP’s base salary, which now sits at close to $220,000 a year following a 3.5 per cent pay increase in June. A classroom teacher’s base salary is less than half that, for work that shapes the next generation of the same citizens who those MPs are elected to represent.

I can't help but wonder whether the argument that teachers should simply accept the offer and be grateful would survive if politicians had their own salaries frozen for as long as teachers have had to wait for this agreement. I also wonder how they might react if they were told to accept an offer that only partially addressed the terms of the dispute, simply because one side has decided that the negotiations have dragged on for long enough. Call me cynical, but I suspect not. Politicians are paid to govern. Teachers are paid to educate. If this agreement has taken too long to reach, the responsibility lies with those negotiating it, not with the people who have continued turning up in classrooms across the state each day.

One contradiction I keep returning to, is that parents overwhelmingly say their children are the most important people in their lives. They want the best education, the safest classrooms, teachers who know their child well, who have time to provide meaningful feedback, who notice when something is wrong and who nurture confidence, curiosity, resilience and kindness. None of these expectations are unreasonable. Most educators would agree they are exactly what every child deserves.

While recent reports state that around 60% of parents support the strikes, the other forty percent, along with plenty of people without children too, often respond with horror the second teachers argue for an improvement in the conditions that might actually make all these things achievable. Those two positions cannot comfortably coexist. It is tough to claim that children are society’s greatest priority while simultaneously accepting an education system operating under chronic pressure, or to expect individualised support while refusing to pay teachers for the time it takes to provide it. Equally, it is hard to expect teachers to build relationships, develop children’s executive functioning, manage increasingly complex behaviour, communicate consistently with families, design engaging learning experiences and assess thoughtfully, while also dismissing any request for a sustainable workload as ‘greedy’.

I think about a school excursion a friend described recently, where several students simply decided they’d had enough and went home without telling anyone. She was responsible for those children, and in the thirty minutes before they were found, every catastrophic possibility you could imagine had run through her mind. After establishing that each student had turned up safely at home, the parental response when confronted with their children’s actions was remarkably casual. I couldn’t help thinking about my own childhood. If I had walked away from a school excursion without permission, I wouldn’t have been worrying about what my teacher thought about it. I would have been far more concerned about explaining myself to my mum and dad. Somewhere along the line, that relationship seems to have shifted with schools increasingly expected to absorb responsibilities that once sat far more clearly with families.

That shift shows up in smaller, more personal ways too. I’ve had a parent, a businessman, come into my classroom and tell me how I should be running it, having spent maybe fifteen minutes over the course of a school year actually inside it. He wasn’t there to discuss how we could work together to support the growth of his son. Instead, he spent the entire meeting offering me advice on how to do my job better, while I sat there smiling and trying not to roll my eyes. I don’t walk into an accountant’s office and explain tax law just because I teach maths. I don’t tell engineers how to design bridges because I teach trusses in design technology and I don’t visit a surgeon before an operation and suggest a different technique because I once taught students how to dissect a frog. Yet teachers are constantly dished out this kind of unsolicited professional critique as if it were all just part of the job.

Parents are experts on their own child, and that knowledge is invaluable to us as educators. Teachers bring a different kind of expertise to the table, one which is developed through years of university study, ongoing professional learning and daily application of this learning through our practice. We draw on research in child development, the cognitive science of learning, curriculum, assessment, collaboration and team work and the complex task of helping twenty-five completely different children learn together in the same room. Teaching is not simply a transfer of knowledge. It is the continual application of evidence about how children develop, think, remember, regulate their emotions and learn, adapted hundreds of times each day to the needs of different students. Each stakeholder brings a different form of expertise, and our schools work best to support our students when they are treated as complementary rather than competing.

What has changed, I suspect, isn’t simply behaviour. It’s accountability. Somewhere along the way, schools became responsible for almost everything a child experiences during the day, while losing much of the authority needed to respond when something goes wrong. If a child disappears on an excursion, it’s the teacher who fears losing their job, or worse, facing criminal charges, while the child involved and their parents often treat the whole episode as inconsequential. It is an extraordinary arrangement and this imbalance is rarely acknowledged, yet it sits beneath almost every contemporary conversation we have about schools and education.

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Perhaps what saddens me most is that this whole debate has become almost entirely focused on the adults. Teachers versus government. Teachers versus parents. Taxpayers versus public servants. Pay rises versus budgets. Amongst all this, we’ve stopped making this about the group that matters most.

Ask children what they remember about school and I’d be stunned if they came back with NAPLAN scores or waxing lyrical for their love of spelling tests. Like us, they remember the teachers who believed in them, the art they created and the music they performed. They’ll tell you about building something great in Design Technologies, the science experiment that exploded and hit the ceiling of the lab, the history lesson that changed how they saw their own connection to the world or the sporting team they were fiercely proud to be part of. They remember their friends, the excursions and the feeling of belonging - or not. They remember how school made them feel.

Of course literacy and numeracy matter. They’re fundamental, and every child deserves to leave school able to read, write and think mathematically. But over the past several decades of education reforms and well-intentioned initiatives, I think we’ve confused foundations with purpose. What we’ve built is a system which is increasingly organised around what is easiest to measure, rather than around what is most valuable to develop. Children are not spreadsheets, data points or future workers to be optimised. They are human beings and treating them as commodities ignores almost everything they are telling us about what really matters to them.

Ironically, the subjects children consistently say they love are often the ones pushed to the margins: art, music, drama, physical education, design technologies, science, history, geography. These aren’t distractions from learning. They’re often the portals through which children discover who they are, where they find confidence, purpose, curiosity and joy. Literacy and numeracy don’t disappear from those classrooms. They’re embedded throughout them, because reading, writing, communicating and thinking mathematically are tools for understanding the world rather than ends in themselves. Children may read because they’re researching volcanoes, they may write because they’re making a documentary, they may deliver a speech to persuade you towards their point of view. They measure because they’re building something and they calculate because the mathematics is directly relevant to the task in front of them.

If our relentless focus on literacy and numeracy over the past two decades was so genuinely effective, it’s worth asking why adult literacy and numeracy are declining rather than improving. Nearly half of Australian adults now have below-average literacy proficiency, and more than half have below average numeracy proficiency. Maybe what this demonstrates is that the problem was never that schools failed to value these skills enough. Perhaps the problem was that we gradually came to treat them as the entire purpose of education rather than as foundational tools for learning. In doing so, we’ve reduced education to the things that were easiest to test, and lost much of the curiosity, creativity, meaning and engagement that made those skills stick in the first place.

It would be easy to read all of this as a Victorian story, confined to one state’s bargaining table, but the patterns we’re seeing here extend well beyond our borders. Well over half of Australian public school principals report workforce shortages which is more than double the OECD average, while Victoria alone is projected to be short more than two thousand teachers by 2030. Other states report similar pressures, with graduate attrition running as high as one in two within the first five years in some parts of the country.

The crisis isn’t uniquely Australian either. UNESCO estimates that the world needs tens of millions of additional teachers to meet basic education targets, and school systems across wealthy and developing nations alike are struggling to keep classrooms adequately staffed. In countries like Australia, the UK and the United States, the shortage tends to show up less as a lack of newly trained teachers and more as an inability to retain the ones who are already there and who are experienced, but have become worn down by stress, poor mental health, unmanageable workloads and conditions that keep deteriorating rather than improving.

We keep responding to this pattern the same way we’ve responded to Victoria’s dispute - by treating it as a series of isolated negotiating failures rather than evidence of something deeper, something structural. A pay rise, however long overdue, doesn't redesign a system that was built for a version of childhood and a version of the teaching workforce that no longer exists. Applying that kind of band-aid to a system already this strained might buy a government a season of quiet, but it does nothing to address why so many capable, well-trained people no longer want to stay in this profession at all.

For years now, the canary in the coal mine of education has been coughing rather than singing. Students have been telling us that they find school irrelevant and as a result, behaviours are becoming more complex. Parents are becoming increasingly anxious.
Teachers have been saying that workloads are unsustainable while Principals are struggling to recruit and retain staff. Graduates are leaving the profession within their first few years in the classroom. None of these are isolated warning signs. They’re all pointing at the same mine.

And still, when the people closest to the problem finally draw a line in the sand and insist that something has to change, the response from our leaders, the media and too much of the public remains astonishingly simple - stop being greedy, just be grateful.

If that’s genuinely where we’ve arrived as a society, then perhaps the greatest lesson our children are learning isn’t coming from the curriculum at all. It’s what we’ve taught them about what, and who, we choose to value. This approach to education is incredibly shortsighted because whatever kind of Australia we want this country to be in twenty years time begins in our classrooms, with our children, right now.

Today, many classrooms across Victoria will sit empty. For some, that will simply be an inconvenience while for others, it will be read as another headline about teachers asking for more when the question it ought to raise is one we've avoided for far too long: what kind of education system are we building for the children who will walk back into those classrooms tomorrow?

Today’s strike will eventually end, the bargaining agreement will eventually be signed and the headlines will move onto the next news cycle. But unless we stop confusing the administration of education with its fundamental purpose, we’ll find ourselves back here again in just a few years’ time, still arguing about adults instead of building the education system that our children truly deserve.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this article contains images, voices and names of deceased persons.

If you read Part One, you'll recognise why Charlie Mullaley is the thread that ties these two essays together. If you didn't, his story is where this one has to begin.

Charlie Mullaley was ten months old.

He was not a statistic or a data point in a Senate inquiry. He was a beautiful, smiley-eyed Yamatji baby. On the night before Charlie died, his mother had called the WA police for help after being brutally beaten by her partner Mervyn Bell. She had sustained life-threatening injuries, including broken bones and damage to her kidney and spleen. After becoming emotionally distressed and assaulting an officer on the night she nearly died, the police arrested both Tamica and her father, Ted, instead of seeking the man who had attacked her, leaving Charlie, who had witnessed the violence, in the care of Bell’s relatives.

By the time Ted was released and returned to the house, Bell had taken Charlie. Knowing Bell had threatened to kill the baby, Ted immediately returned to Broome Police, repeatedly warning officers that his grandson’s life was in danger and pleading with them to find him before it was too late. Those warnings were not met with the urgency they demanded and, when police eventually issued an alert for Bell’s vehicle several hours later, they did so using incorrect licence plate information.

Over the next fifteen hours, Bell sexually assaulted and tortured Charlie across more than a thousand kilometres. Charlie was found near Karratha with injuries from his head to his feet. He did not survive. The judge who convicted Bell described it as “one of the more evil crimes that I have encountered.”

No officer faced charges, and no inquest was held into the police response. The system that failed Charlie has never been held to account. When Tamica later sought a coronial inquest into her son’s death, the State Coroner declined her request. She challenged that decision in the Supreme Court of Western Australia, but Justice Le Miere upheld it, finding that a further inquest was not “necessary or desirable in the interests of justice”. One of the reasons given was that the police response had already been investigated by WA Police Internal Affairs.

Read that again slowly. The institution whose conduct was being questioned had already investigated itself, and that internal investigation became one of the reasons a further independent inquiry was considered unnecessary.

Nine years later, in 2022, the WA Attorney General issued an unprecedented apology in Parliament and pardoned both Tamica and her father, describing their treatment as “clearly deficient”. He said he could not find another case in modern Western Australian history where such pardons had been granted. Tamica told Parliament, “If police had treated me like a human being that night, my baby Charlie would be alive today.”

The apology came but the accountability never did. The officers involved have never been publicly sanctioned for what happened that night, and the institutional decisions that left Charlie unprotected have never been independently examined in the way Tamica has spent years asking for.

Part One of this essay was about what happens to women when institutions consistently fail to protect them. Charlie’s story reminds us that those institutional failures rarely end with the woman who first asks for help. Children inherit them too.

The systems that fail women often fail the children living alongside them, not because they are separate failures, but because they are the same failure viewed from a different place. Violence does not stop at the bedroom door. It follows children into their homes, their schools and, sometimes, as it did for Charlie, to their deaths.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse calls this a “closed authority system". This refers to institutions that control their own records, their own reporting mechanisms, their own reputations and the dependency of the people in their care, all at the same time. They are systems structured so that the people most harmed by them are also the people least able to report that harm, while the institution most responsible is also the institution responsible for investigating it. The abuse that flourished inside these systems was not incidental to their structure. It was protected by it.

What does a closed authority system look like in practice? Charlie’s story provides one answer.

In its own self-review of the police response, WA Police acknowledged that “assumptions were made about the cause of aggression and other behaviour instead of a dispassionate analysis of the whole scene which began with violence to Tamica Mullaley.” In the same report, officers were described as viewing the “aggression and behaviour of the Mullaleys” as a significant factor in their delayed response to Charlie’s abduction. Even after Charlie's death, the institution's own explanation still frames the family's behaviour as the problem to be analysed before returning to the original crime that brought police to the house in the first place.

Charlie did not die decades before the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, but while it was still sitting. While thousands of survivors were giving evidence about institutions that had failed to protect children, another child was being failed by another institution in real time.

When the Royal Commission concluded in 2017, it had heard from 4,029 survivors in private sessions. Four thousand and twenty-nine people sat alone in a room and described what had been done to them, many for the first time in any formal setting and often decades after the abuse had occurred. Catholic institutions accounted for 2,489 of those victim-survivors. Schools generated 31.8 percent of victim-survivor accounts. Residential care and out-of-home care emerged as major recurring settings, particularly the pre-1990 religious homes where children were sent for - a majority of whom are First People children - who had already been failed by every other system available to them.

The Commission made 409 recommendations. Its central finding was not that Australia had a problem with a handful of monstrous individuals but that many of our institutions had been structured in ways that enabled abuse, protected themselves and repeatedly failed the children in their care.

What happened after that finding is just as revealing.

By 2022, five years after the Commission concluded, 27 percent of the recommendations directed to the federal government remained in progress rather than implemented, and that figure covers only Commonwealth responsibilities. The recommendations directed at states, territories, churches and other non-government institutions on the other hand, were largely left to those institutions to self-monitor and self-report.

Children's Commissioners warned by 2021 that some jurisdictions appeared to be counting meetings, planning documents and other preliminary work as though recommendations had been implemented, even when little had materially changed for children. In other words, they were marking their own homework rather generously. Meanwhile, the two settings with the weakest reform implementation remained residential care and youth detention, both closed institutional environments where children are almost entirely dependent on the systems responsible for their care. They are also the settings where children with the least social capital, the fewest trusted adults and the fewest opportunities to make themselves heard beyond the walls surrounding them are sent, often being seen as “problematic”.

For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, who remain significantly overrepresented in both settings, this is not simply an administrative failure. It reflects the same institutional logic that left Tamica Mullaley in handcuffs while Charlie was violently disappeared into the night.

The abuse of children did not stop while governments debated implementation and institutions assessed their own progress.

In 2018, the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation received 14,285 reports of online child abuse in it’s first year of operation. By the 2024-25 financial year, that figure had reached 82,764. That is an average of more than 226 reports of abuse being sent in every single day. The number of reports has increased every year since the Centre opened. Its only trajectory is up.

The Australian Federal Police encourages us to use precise language when discussing the kind of materials accessed and possessed by many child sex offenders. The correct term is child abuse material, not child pornography, because pornography implies consent and suggests participation rather than abuse. Now, if we go back to the 24-25 figure, every image in that count represents an actual child being abused. Eighty-two thousand, seven hundred and sixty-four reports in a single year. While the numbers are climbing, Australia continues producing reports, recommendations and implementation updates, yet the abuse itself continues to grow.

So where does this material come from? Who creates it? Who are the people producing these photographs and videos, and who are the children trapped inside them?

Remarkably, Australia did not conduct the first nationally representative study of child sexual abuse practices among Australian men until 2023. It is difficult to overstate how extraordinary that is. We spent decades responding to the consequences of child sexual abuse before asking, at population scale, who was actually committing it. That sustained failure to ask the question is itself revealing. It says something about whose safety we have historically treated as urgent, and whose we have not.

The study found that around one in six Australian men reports sexual feelings towards children, while almost one in five reports sexual feelings towards children and/or has sexually offended against them. Yet the finding that stayed with me was not the prevalence. It was the profile of the undetected specialist offender, the man who has been offending for years without coming to the attention of authorities.

He is almost three times more likely to be working with children than men with no such history. He is more likely to be married. He earns a higher income. He reports stronger social support. In the language of the study, he appears outwardly pro-social, well liked, trusted, emotionally regulated and highly premeditated in the grooming and targeting of his victims.

He is not the stranger. He is the person in the room.

Ashley Griffith spent nineteen years working in childcare centres in Brisbane, Sydney and Pisa, Italy, trusted with the care of the same children he was abusing. Griffith was sentenced to life in prison in November 2024 for sexually abusing 73 young girls. The subsequent inquiry found that multiple complaints had been made about him to employers, regulators and police before his arrest, not one of which progressed. He had held a valid Working with Children Check right up until the moment he was arrested on 1,623 charges. Three separate child protection systems, in Queensland, New South Wales and Italy, each had opportunities to detect him. Not one of them did.

David James worked casually at nearly sixty childcare centres across New South Wales while simultaneously employed as a probationary police constable. NSW Police told the court it was unaware he was also working in childcare. More than 1,500 parents were notified after his arrest. He was sentenced to a maximum of twelve years in July 2025, just days before this piece was published. Two institutions had opportunities to know and yet both claimed ignorance.

Stephen Porter worked for the ACT government in information technology by day, and in his spare time he volunteered as a youth AFL coach at the Ainslie Football Club and Belconnen Magpies in Canberra. Between 2009 and 2020 he sexually offended against four boys he coached, including rape, grooming, and producing child exploitation material. More than 1,500 videos of children being sexually abused were found in his home. The sentencing judge called it "a human tragedy" and "a deep well of harm and suffering." His community had no idea, and the system which should have caught him failed, enabling him to get away with these crimes for years.

These are not anomalies. They are men who closely resemble the profile identified by the UNSW researchers: trusted, socially connected, outwardly respectable and able to offend for years without attracting suspicion.

What their cases illustrate is not that individual men are uniquely monstrous, though what they did is monstrous. What they illustrate is that the system has no reliable mechanism for finding the man the UNSW study described, because the system is largely designed to respond to reports rather than to proactively identify patterns of behaviour. The people least likely to report are children, whose testimony is consistently the most difficult to gather, most vulnerable to challenge and least likely to result in conviction. The architecture of our response to child sexual abuse is reactive, fragmented, under-resourced and, as the ACCCE figures show, losing ground every year.

Nowhere is this more visible than in the institution that makes our laws.

Between October 2023 and June 2024, the parliamentary complaints service found that one in three people working in the building had experienced sexual harassment. In its first nine months of operation it received 339 cases, thirty of which involved rape or sexual assault, assault, sexual harassment, harassment, stalking or intimidation. All this is happening within the walls of the institution responsible for making laws about women's safety.

In June 2023, Senator Lidia Thorpe named a Liberal colleague in the Senate chamber and accused him of harassment and sexual assault. She was directed to withdraw those words under parliamentary standing orders. The following day she described, without naming anyone, being followed, cornered in a parliamentary stairwell and inappropriately touched. Senator David Van denied everything, was never charged, and sat in the Senate until his term expired in June 2025. Thorpe later said she had been "demonised" and was not believed until a white woman made similar allegations. "That," she said, "is systemic racism."

Gareth Ward held the NSW seat of Kiama from 2011. In July 2025 he was found guilty of sexually assaulting an 18-year-old in 2013 and raping a 24-year-old political staffer in 2015. Astonishingly despite this, his constituents went on to re-elect him in 2023 while he was awaiting trial. After his conviction he refused to resign and quit only moments before his colleagues voted to forcibly eject him. He was sentenced to nearly six years in prison.

Brittany Higgins is arguably the most famous victim of sexual assault in Australia. She was raped at Parliament House in 2019 by Bruce Lehrmann, a colleague, on a couch inside a ministerial office. When she went public in 2021, the institution's response was to manage the story, while a significant portion of the media and public's response was to manage her. They scrutinised her personal life, her drinking, her mental health and even stalked her and her husband overseas. The goal was to focus on anything that might shift the weight of the story away from what had been done to her and onto who she was. The Federal Court found in civil proceedings in 2024 that the rape claim was substantially true. Every subsequent appeal, including to the High Court, has failed. The government paid her $2.4 million in compensation. Lehrmann also faces two further counts of rape in Queensland relating to alleged events in 2021, with a trial scheduled for November 2026, yet she is still the one people argue about.

These are not men at the margins of Australian society. They are men at its centre, in our childcare centres and football clubs and police forces and even within the parliament itself. The pattern that connects them is not one of individual moral failure, but rather a system that has never been structurally required to prioritise the safety of women and children over the comfort, reputation, and continuation of the men inside it.

Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted of facilitating the sexual trafficking of girls for Jeffrey Epstein and his associates, a network that, as Whitney Webb's exhaustively researched two-volume work1 makes clear, was considerably larger and more structurally embedded in political and financial power than the version that made the headlines. A friend of Maxwell's told Vanity Fair journalist Vanessa Grigoriadis that when she asked Maxwell what she thought of the underage girls, Maxwell looked at her and said, "They're nothing. They're trash."

We call Trump a paedophile from a comfortable distance and feel righteous about it, yet we rarely apply the same moral scrutiny to our own uncomfortable realities. Our parliament received dozens of serious allegations of sexual assault, stalking and intimidation in just eight months. Almost one in five Australian men reports sexual feelings towards children and/or has sexually offended against them. We waited until 2023 to ask, at population scale, who was actually committing sexual crimes against children. Then, after the Royal Commission delivered 409 recommendations for protecting children, we handed many of them back to the very institutions they were written about and accepted those institutions' own assessment of how they were getting along. What could possibly go wrong with that?

Meanwhile, as I was writing this piece, another sexual crime committed by an Australian man unfolded here in Thailand. Simon Peter Carman was arrested at Bangkok’s airport while trying to fly home after allegedly strangling a seventeen-year-old Thai girl nicknamed Cake, stuffing her body into a suitcase and abandoning it beside a railway line.

The Thai press named her, humanised her and sat with her family’s grief, using their platform to tell her story to the nation. Much of the Australian coverage, by contrast, centred the Australian accused. Australian men do not confine their violence to Australian women. It often crosses borders. Yet the women on the other end of it are almost always poor, foreign and easy for Australians to overlook, while the men responsible can be on a plane home the next morning to a country still arguing about whether Royal Commissions merely fund lawyers.

It is remarkably easy to locate moral failure when it is happening somewhere else. Looking squarely at the institutions in our own mirror has proved considerably more difficult.

The question has never really been whether Australia is capable of mobilising political urgency - clearly we can. The question is why that urgency has so rarely been directed towards the safety of Australian women and children.

In Part One, I wrote about Pauline Hanson’s appearance at the National Press Club and the pattern of political indifference her speech exposed. For those reading this without Part One, the short version is this: Hanson has promised to abolish the Sex Discrimination Commissioner, oppose paid parental leave and abortion access, and make it easier to dismiss workers from employment. She is advancing a platform that would strip away much of the institutional scaffolding that allows women to maintain economic lives independent of men while presenting herself as one of us. The press gallery, which almost tore Anthony Albanese apart for suggesting a Royal Commission into antisemitism might not be necessary, watched Hanson promise to dismantle protections for half the population and largely reported it as a story about monoculturalism.

Placed alongside everything else in this essay, Hanson’s platform becomes a statement about whose safety a government is prepared to protect. Fewer than one in ten of her own voters oppose all abortion access, while sixty-two percent of Australians support it. The agenda she is advancing is not a response to public demand. It is being pursued despite it, backed by undisclosed donations and a private aircraft supplied by Australia’s richest person, whose Townsville speech a few weeks ago suggested offering Australian land and taxpayer money to Elon Musk’s rocket company, Israeli defence manufacturers and Taiwanese chip makers, while mentioning accommodation for “frightened women and children who face horrendous unacceptable violence and rapes” in a single passing line. One sentence which was basically an afterthought, in a speech otherwise devoted to transferring Australian resources into private hands.

One Nation is nevertheless attracting substantial support from large numbers of Australian women. Some of those women have been comprehensively failed by every progressive institution that claimed it would protect them, and have concluded that at least Hanson performs anger on their behalf. For many, this is not stupidity, but a rational response to a feeling of abandonment by the ALP and LNP/National parties. The tragedy is that, if it one day becomes a reality, the consequences of the platform Pauline is promoting would fall most heavily on the same women who are considering voting for it.

This is the con. It works because we’ve created the conditions for it to work. Pauline Hanson did not create the disillusionment many women now feel towards Australian institutions. She inherited it after decades of underfunding, institutional self-protection and political choices that repeatedly treated women’s safety as negotiable had done that work already. It should surprise nobody that some women eventually stop believing the existing political architecture has anything meaningful left to offer them.

Viewed together, these stories reveal something even larger than individual institutional failures. Long before the rest of Australia began questioning whether institutions genuinely served the people they claimed to protect, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities already understood what it meant to live inside systems that were never designed with them in mind. They have lived for generations with policing that protects some people more readily than others, child protection systems that continue to remove children while failing to keep them safe, inquiries whose recommendations have come and gone, and governments which keeping issuing apologies long after the damage has been done. None of this history belongs in the past, it continues to shape who is believed, who receives protection, whose suffering becomes politically urgent and whose is quietly absorbed into the background noise of national life.

Increasingly, more Australians appear to be encountering fragments of that same reality. Not in identical ways, because history matters and distinct experiences are not interchangeable, but through a growing recognition that institutions do not always exist to protect the people who depend upon them. Resources continue flowing upward while responsibility flows downward. Promises remain expansive while outcomes often remain depressingly familiar.

Mining. Media. Money. Weapons. Those are the forces shaping this moment2. They now operate through democratic institutions rather than colonial administrations, yet the logic feels remarkably familiar. The East India Company no longer requires a crown or a flag. Capital crosses borders perfectly well without either, purchasing influence wherever governments are willing to sell it.

At the bottom of this hierarchy are the people with the least wealth, the least influence and the fewest ways of making their suffering politically inconvenient. Women. Children. First Peoples. Migrant communities. They are the women turned away from underfunded services. They are the children growing up in residential care and youth detention while reform stalls. They are Charlie. They are Cake. They are thousands of others whose names most Australians will never hear or remember, despite the fact that their lives tell us far more about the health of this country than any speech delivered inside Parliament House.

“They’re nothing. They’re trash.”

I no longer hear Maxwell's words as the confession of one particularly cruel woman. I hear them as the logic that keeps resurfacing beneath every story in this essay. Few people in leadership would ever say those words out loud. Instead, they are expressed through what we choose to fund, what we choose to ignore, whose suffering becomes politically urgent and whose quietly slips beneath the line. They are implied in the budgets that never arrive, recommendations that remain unimplemented, apologies offered years after the fact and institutions that continue investigating themselves while insisting meaningful change is underway.

The question this essay leaves me with, the only question really, is whether we are prepared to recognise this logic when it appears in our own institutions or whether we will keep proving Ghislaine Maxwell right.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people should be aware that this article contains images, voices and names of deceased persons.

Staying connected to the world over the past few weeks has left me feeling flummoxed. When I am overwhelmed, I start looking for patterns. When there is too much information rolling around in my brain to process all at once, some part of it goes quiet and starts searching for the shape underneath the waterfall of opinion and outrage.

It wasn’t one thing which left me feeling this way, but more of a pile-up… the kind of moments where the news keeps arriving and your brain starts making the sound that the early days of dial-up internet made while attempting to connect. At the centre of that pile up was Pauline Hanson’s appearance at the National Press Club two weeks ago, and the several days I spent afterwards trying to work out why I felt the way I was feeling about it. It felt less like outrage than ike something heavier and slower.

Of course, the Germans have a perfect way of expressing it - altschmerz - which describes (and I’m paraphrasing) a lingering weariness of dealing with the same old shit over and over again.

What I have found interesting is that, because I largely get my news from Substack these days, Hanson’s awful, hour-long performance of racist, misogynistic grievance is something nobody has actually moved on from yet. This gives me a glimmer of hope amidst my German feelings of sadness, as the content of what she said was polarising enough that she may have lost a chunk of her own base over it. It’s just that so much is being said in the aftermath, by so many people, at such speed, that if like me, your algorithm is set to ‘politics’, then your exhaustion isn’t from silence. It’s from trying to work out what to engage with and when you just need to stop scrolling and walk away.

The mainstream coverage, for what it’s worth, did exactly what was expected.

Almost nothing.

Most outlets really loved the term ‘monoculture’ which effectively became 80% of the story. One or two networks and outlets reported on ABC and SBS cuts, especially because it contrasted nicely with the buzz word of the moment, at a time when the Socceroos look less monocultural on the international stage than they’ve ever done before.

If you take even one minute to poke around and really examine what Pauline Hanson actually said at that podium - not the highlights or the soundbites or the trans insurgency moment that got a bit of an uproar - but the whole picture of what she is promising to do if One Nation ever holds real power, the correct response from the institutions whose job it is to hold power accountable is not a 48-hour news cycle. It should be a national reckoning.

Compare that to what happened the moment Albanese made the briefest, most cautiously reasonable suggestion that perhaps a hugely expensive and complex Royal Commission into antisemitism was not what Australia needed in the aftermath of the Bondi attack. The press gallery nearly took his head off, and really just for saying out loud what many Australians were also quietly thinking. Within a day, he walked it back as though he was in opposition, not the leader of the governing party.

Now, a mere six months later, in a year when advocacy monitors report that 32 women and 12 children have been killed by men known to them in domestic violence incidents, Hanson, who is arguably the most well-known Senator in our nation, stands before the National Press Club and promises to eliminate the office of the Sex Discrimination Commissioner before openly declaring war on paid parental leave and simultaneously positioning trans people as the ones who Australian women should actually be afraid of.

Meanwhile the response from that same press gallery, the one which lost its mind over protecting the human rights of the Jewish community in Australia, when it came to a loud proclamation from Aunty Pauline about stamping out women’s rights in this country was: ‘What is monoculturalism? How did the history of monoculturalism shape the Australia of our past?’… You literally couldn’t make this up, and yet… on they move. Next story is that Pauline has control now. Control over what, I don’t know, and honestly most days I’m not sure she does either.

The media response wasn't actually the thing that stayed with me though; it was simply the first pattern I noticed. The longer I thought about Hanson’s speech and the different insights it offered into the kind of leader she might be, the more I realised she had merely exposed something much older and much more deeply embedded in Australian public life. The problem doesn’t lie with one politician or in one speech but in the language we use, and the pervasive political passivity that these language choices allow to continue. It softens the conversations we urgently need to be having, until those conversations stop meaning anything genuine or reflecting any real will for systemic change.

Pauline Hanson has been in Australian politics for nearly thirty years, so we are not dealing with a fringe eccentric who will eventually take her quite extreme beliefs and quietly go away. We are dealing with a political force whose ideas have become remarkably normalised in Australian public life. That hasn’t happened by accident.

Based on the contents of her speech, Pauline Hanson wants Australian women economically dependent, reproductively controlled and institutionally unprotected. She simultaneously opposes paid parental leave, childcare infrastructure and abortion access, and has promised to dismantle many, if not most, of the oversight mechanisms designed to protect women from discrimination. Overall, what she is promising, with her war chest of undisclosed sources safely stowed aboard the private plane Gina gifted her, is to make the lives of Australian women measurably worse.

She does all of this while presenting herself as somehow being an ordinary Aussie. Last time I checked, ordinary Aussies weren’t getting invitations to miss two weeks of work and fly off to party with billionaires at Mar-a-Lago.

I digress, however, because this is actually not a piece about Pauline Hanson. She is simply the beginning of it, the thing that cracked the surface of my thinking. What I found underneath ran much deeper. It was much older and far larger than one Queensland Senator with a talent for performing grievance. What I found was a pattern of political indifference so consistent, so comprehensive and so depressingly predictable that it had started to feel less like negligence or coincidence, and more like a quiet permissiveness between men.

In May this year, as Australians were absorbing news of yet another woman murdered by a man she had loved, a petition calling for a Royal Commission into male violence reached 91,000 signatures. When Albanese was asked about it, his response was, “What does a Royal Commission do besides fund lawyers? What we need here is solutions. We know what’s required.”

I want to pause on this for a moment, because in my humble opinion, it matters deeply which words a Prime Minister reaches for, and when. This is the same man who, when announcing a Royal Commission into antisemitism following the Bondi attack, described Royal Commissions as “the most powerful form of inquiry we have” to find “hard truths and show us the way forward.” The most powerful form of inquiry we have is swiftly put to work for one very specific moment of crisis. For one facing women all over the nation, we get… what does a Royal Commission do besides fund lawyers?

The week those words were spoken, a woman in her sixties had been found dead at a remote Tasmanian property, in what police described as a murder-suicide. A 29-year-old woman had been found dead in Werribee. A 47-year-old man had been charged with murder after a woman and two boys, aged four and twelve, were found dead in a Sydney home. Three incidents. A mother. Two children. One weekend and one day.

We know what’s required.

This isn’t an abstract argument for me. Like many other Australian women I know, I have experienced sexual assault. I have had countless conversations with friends who have experienced domestic violence at the hands of husbands and intimate partners and have watched more than one close friend navigate court systems that made them feel like the accused rather than the plaintiff. I have read the documentation. Actual emails, text messages, medical records and legal correspondence that made it crystal clear to me that the institutions supposedly designed to protect women and children in this country often did the exact opposite. On more than one occasion, I have watched our courts compound that harm by handing down outcomes that favoured abusive men, through decisions that privileged character references over patterns of coercion and abuse described by the women living with them.

What I find interesting is that I have also lived outside Australia for nearly two decades now, yet the assaults I have experienced in my adult life have all, without exception, happened on visits home. I don't know yet what to make of that fully, except that there seems to be a culture in which some men feel emboldened to use violence against women because they believe the consequences are unlikely to fall on them.

Perhaps that is also why this issue feels so much more visible to women than it often does to other men. Many of the men responsible for domestic abuse maintain impeccable public reputations as respected colleagues, successful professionals and devoted fathers or pillars of their communities. It is not their behaviour that changes depending on who is watching, it is the women around them who adapt. They become quieter, more careful, more accommodating, or they leave altogether. Meanwhile the man continues to be seen as the same decent bloke everyone thinks they know. Most of the time we women don't make a sound about it because the experience of making a sound has taught us, repeatedly, what kind of response to expect.

In 2024-25, 28 women were killed by a current or former intimate partner in Australia. That figure, which represents a decrease on the year before, was reported as something approaching good news. What does not get reported as news at all, or not with anything like the same regularity, is what is happening to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and girls, whose experience of this crisis makes the national figures look almost positive by comparison.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were killed at six times the national rate last year. Two-thirds of those homicides occurred within family or intimate relationships, which means the danger was not ‘out there, somewhere’. It was at home, with someone known to them and in circumstances that most people would have considered safe.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are up to seven times more likely to be homicide victims than non-Indigenous women. They are 33 times more likely to end up hospitalised as a result of family and domestic violence. Thirty-three times! That figure is not a rounding error or a statistical anomaly. It is the number you arrive at when you combine geographic isolation, chronic underfunding of services, a policing system that has consistently treated many First Peoples women as perpetrators rather than victims, and decades of political decisions that have treated their safety as someone else’s problem.

First Peoples women represent about three percent of Australia’s adult female population. They represent an average of sixteen percent of its female homicide victims, year after year, across three and a half decades of data. That gap, between three percent of the population and sixteen percent of the dead, is the measure of everything described in this piece. It is what political indifference looks like when it is given enough time.

It is not only women. From 1989-90 to 2022-23, 158 First Peoples children were recorded as homicide victims, representing thirteen percent of all child homicide victims in the country, from a population that makes up a fraction of Australia’s children. First Peoples children also make up 53 percent of all missing children reports. Many of the victims counted in these statistics are not women. They are girls. Some of them are babies.

We know this because people like Senator Dorinda Cox and Sherele Moody have done the work of counting them. Not the government and not the institutions. Individuals, doing the work that should have been done by the systems that were supposed to protect these children in the first place.

There is a distinction the Senate inquiry made that I have not been able to stop thinking about since I read it. These women and children, the inquiry heard, are not missing. They are violently disappeared. Missing is passive, it implies someone failed to stay found. Violently disappeared means someone made them disappear, and that the systems which should have been paying attention, were busy looking the other way. The committee’s own finding was that for many of these women and children there had been “little, if any, justice.” Senator Dorinda Cox, who spearheaded the inquiry, called its recommendations “weak and toothless”.

Two years on, it is difficult to argue that much has changed. The policing failures the inquiry documented, where First Peoples women are over-policed in some situations yet ignored in others, and too often misidentified as perpetrators rather than victims, appear to remain structurally in place. There has, finally, been movement towards a national framework developed in consultation with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, and that is a significant step. Yet it also raises a more fundamental question. How do we expect recommendations to produce lasting change when they are implemented, monitored and enforced by many of the same institutions the inquiry found were failing women and children in the first place?

One aspect of the inquiry’s recommendations is worth pausing on for a moment though, as ‘Recommendation 10’ calls for trauma-informed healing, a violence prevention framework for men and boys, and community-based support programs that promote individual and community responsibility. Within the scope of an inquiry into missing and murdered Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and children, those recommendations make complete sense. What is harder to understand though, is why the same principles are not considered equally necessary for Australian men more broadly.

The implication is difficult to ignore. Violence prevention is treated as something other communities need, while the rest of Australian manhood requires no equivalent reckoning. That, in itself, is an answer to the question of whose safety this country has decided to take seriously.

Those numbers do not exist in isolation, and it would be dishonest to present them as though they do. Violence at this scale and with this consistency is not simply a product of individual men, although they certainly play most of the leading roles. It is a product of economic, geographic and institutional systems that have been allowed to remain exactly as they are because the people those systems fail have never been considered important enough to fix them for.

Economic abuse is not a side effect of domestic violence. It is frequently one of its primary instruments. Research consistently shows that financial control, whether it involves limiting a partner’s access to money, sabotaging her employment, accumulating debt in her name and threatening to strip her of assets upon separation, is deployed deliberately as a mechanism of entrapment. A woman who cannot access funds cannot leave.

The damage doesn’t end when she manages to leave either, and the reasons for that are not mysterious. Nearly half of women who reported experiencing family violence said it affected their capacity to get to work, with physical injury or restraint being the primary reason. Women who are regularly injured, who are being sleep-deprived, whose partners renege on childminding arrangements or physically prevent them from leaving the house, do not build stable employment records. Women with histories of domestic violence have more disrupted work histories, are on lower incomes, have changed jobs more often, and are employed at higher rates in casual and part-time work than women who’ve never experienced violence. Casual workers are the easiest to let go.

Between a quarter and one half of victim-survivors report having lost a job partly because of family violence. There is a particular cruelty in what the research also tells us about this, as employment is one of the primary pathways out of a violent relationship and almost always, financial independence is what makes leaving possible. Yet violence is precisely what destroys the employment that would enable it. As Professor Anne Summers put it, too many women are being forced to choose between enduring violence or leaving and facing severe economic consequences.

This trap is far from being accidental though; it is of our own making. It is reinforced every time a leader, party or government signals that paid parental leave is a luxury, that childcare is a personal responsibility, and that the infrastructure that women need to maintain independent economic lives is something we simply cannot afford to prioritise.

Pauline Hanson made her position on all of this explicit at the National Press Club. She wants to make it easier for employers to sack workers. I was stunned as I listened to her describing Australians as lazy, as people who don’t turn up and don’t do the work. Whether at home or overseas, Aussies can be proud of our work ethic - we are the opposite of what she describes. She denied the gender pay gap exists at all, attributing it to women’s choices about work and motherhood.

What she didn’t acknowledge is that many women also spend time away from work because they have been injured by the men they live with, because they are sitting in courtrooms trying to obtain intervention orders, because their abusers have hidden the car keys, refused to care for the children or physically prevented them from leaving the house that morning. These are the workers she would make easier to dismiss and whose economic insecurity she dismisses as personal choice.

Of course, it is Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, already navigating the most under-resourced services, the weakest institutional responses and the most precarious employment, who continue to bear the sharpest edge of every one of those political choices.

For First Peoples women, this economic insecurity intersects with geography and deliberate underfunding in ways that compound their disadvantage and make leaving safely difficult to achieve. Culturally safe and trauma informed domestic violence services in remote communities are, according to researchers, critically underfunded or neglected. When a woman in a remote community calls for help, she is often calling into a system already at breaking point. The government’s own rapid review into prevention found that frontline services across the country are so under-resourced they have been forced to conduct what the review called “brief risk assessments on lethality” to determine who they can actually assist.

When Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women do call the police, the Senate inquiry heard that those systems are often experienced as another threat rather than a source of protection. Tamica Mullaley is a Yamatji woman from Broome, Western Australia, and her story is as good an illustration of what that looks like in practice as any inquiry finding.

In March 2013, her partner beat her so severely she was left bleeding and naked. The Police were called, however when Tamica, who was suffering from shock and in pain, became distressed at the scene, the officers arrested her and her father, who was there after responding to his daughter’s call for help. Her father specifically requested that police remove her ten-month-old son Charlie from the scene that night. Despite his pleas, the Police failed to intervene.

While Tamica was taken to hospital in handcuffs, her partner kidnapped Charlie and tortured him for over fifteen hours across more than a thousand kilometres. Charlie was found in Karratha with multiple broken bones, internal bleeding and burns. He did not survive. An investigation which followed found that authorities took hours to act on information about his whereabouts and had even issued the wrong licence plate details for the car which the killer was driving.

When Tamica later applied for a coronial inquest into Charlie's death, a Supreme Court judge declined, finding that it was neither "necessary or desirable in the interest of justice." At around the same time, the Western Australian government launched a full parliamentary inquiry into the Margaret River murders, in which a white family was killed. The National Justice Project's George Newhouse noted the contrast. It was the same state, the same government but the two cases couldn’t have received a more different response.

Tamica told NITV: "The whole system is wrong. They placed him back in a house where he was at risk. It was wrong." To this day, she is still seeking accountability. If you have never heard her name before reading this, ask yourself why. We know the names of the Bondi victims, especially little Matilda. We honour their memories. However when Tamica Mullaley called for help, the system which should have protected her, handcuffed her and put her in a cell, while tiny Charlie paid for it with his life. Who honours Charlies memory?

The multitude of coronial inquests, the various commission findings, the research, data and studies from state to state - all of it points in the same direction. These institutions were never built to protect women, they were built to protect men, and despite thousands of recommendations, they are still functioning exactly as designed. Women and children are the collateral damage, and somewhere along the line it was decided, by men, that this was acceptable.

None of this is simply bad luck and it isn’t even about the complexity of dealing with issues which are indeed complex, but which have been documented and discussed for decades now. To continue sidelining men’s violence against women and children is a choice - one made by people who hold the power to make different ones and which is sustained by a succession of governments that have been told exactly what is happening but continue to decide, year after year, that other things are more urgent.

Part Two, published Friday, follows the evidence into the institutions themselves. Because if these stories are all connected, then the systems surrounding them deserve just as much scrutiny as the men committing the violence.

That’s unusual for me these days, and it wasn’t because I wasn’t writing. In fact, I wrote every day. I filled pages with ideas, half-finished arguments, questions and observations. Some of them felt genuinely promising when I went to bed only to feel hollow when I returned to them the next day. Others started off strongly before wandering off in one direction, while my interest took a different path entirely.

A few months ago I probably would have forced one of them into existence anyway, published something because my own personal target of trying to be consistent demanded it. Now though, I’m learning to trust the process which I have built this year, so that when the rhythm of school flips me back into its orbit, I don’t lose my momentum. One thing that writing has taught me is that there’s a big difference between having words and having something to say. It has also taught me that sometimes the most productive thing you can do is stop trying to pump out something you don’t believe in, and just breathe… let the ideas percolate for a while.

So I resisted the urge to share something beige, and instead spent the week thinking… and writing at least eight false starts to this piece! I retreated into long walks, hours of Law and Order SVU and reading a little each day, waiting for something to really capture the thread for the fuse to light and the dynamite to go off. But it didn’t.

Instead, what this week gave me, in between all the false starts, was a dawning awareness that something else was quietly asking for my attention.

This week I realised that my ‘year off’ is over. The year just passed, when I spent so much time telling people I was taking a break from teaching, has somehow disappeared in the blink of an eye. For those of you who don’t know, I stepped away from the classroom at the end of the 2024-25 school year, for the first time in nearly twenty years of working in schools from Australia to London to Bangkok. I made my decision for many reasons, but at the heart of it was the growing sense that I had been moving so quickly for so long, that I hadn’t stopped to ask myself whether what I was doing actually aligned with what I believe education is for. So I made one of the most radical decisions I have made in my life and took a leap into the unknown.

When the year began, I remember feeling slightly overwhelmed by the freedom stretching out in front of me. For the first time in my adult life I had both the time and the means to step away from work and consider what it was that I needed for myself during this year off. What was I going to do with my time?

Part of the answer to this question was resetting my nervous system after years of working in schools and being highly attuned to responding to the emotional needs of others, while quietly pushing my own off to the side. I needed to find my sense of peace, to spend time doing things which brought me joy - like reading the dozens of half-finished books I have in my apartment! Given that reading has always been like oxygen to me, making reading a daily habit again after losing this to the mental exhaustion of the past several years was a hugely important step on the journey towards rediscovering myself.

Another part of the answer turned out to be reconnecting. After nearly two decades of living overseas, I felt a very strong pull towards home, where the need to reconnect with the country itself, my home city and all of the people in my life required more time than I usually have when I visit each year for a few weeks over Christmas. This made the decision to spend four months back in Australia an easy one. The extended time frame would not only give me more time to spend with my family - and especially with my niece Sadie, who is my absolute favourite person in the world - but also to try and figure out where and how I fit into this place which I have been absent from for so long.

What mattered just as much as the reconnecting, though, was the question of how to find ‘home’ again after so many years of living abroad. That question is made slightly more complicated for me, because I was not born in Australia, and the person who most deeply connected me to it, my mum, passed away from cancer during the pandemic while I was unable to return from Bangkok.

With Mum gone, Australia just feels different to me now. When one of the people most closely tied to your sense of home is no longer there, it leaves a particular kind of emptiness, and I think many people will recognise that feeling. What humbled me was discovering that rather than connections feeling broken or lost, far more had remained than I had expected. Friends from primary school, high school and university, people I’d met while working in Bangkok and London, opened their homes, shared meals, gave up spare rooms and welcomed me back into their lives. Some friendships picked up exactly where they’d left off while others had changed. A few felt like they had faded, and a couple genuinely surprised me with how strong they’d become through this time at home.

The passing of time tends to get framed as a story of loss, and that framing isn’t wrong exactly, but it isn’t the whole story either. Some relationships become stronger precisely because they’ve had to accommodate change, because they’re no longer held together by proximity or routine but by something more durable: the active choice to keep showing up for one another, to share time and laughter and fears and hopes across whatever distance or difference has accumulated between then and now. The time at home wasn’t only about reconnecting. It was about giving me the opportunity to nourish each and every relationship that had kept growing quietly in the background, even though distance kept us physically apart.

The third part of the answer was the one that had been taking shape almost from the beginning - I was going to write a book. Returning home wasn’t only about reconnecting with people, it was about reconnecting with place and with the resources I needed to do the research the book required. The learning that followed wasn’t incidental, it was the whole point.

Being back at home opened up so many new learning and unlearning opportunities for me. For the first time in my career as a teacher, I researched the history of schooling in Australia, which has helped me to better understand some of the bigger issues still prevalent in education policy today, especially in light of religious and private school funding and just how marginalised First People’s remain when it comes to improving education outcomes. I also had access to huge amounts of information which quickly revealed the truth of how the First Peoples of this country experienced colonisation under the British. These histories are as confronting as they are clarifying, and reading them helped me to understand how little I had known about my own country and what had really happened here.

I spent days and days at the State Library of Victoria, reading through journals, newspapers and other incredible primary source materials. I began following threads on decolonisation, philosophy and sociology, while learning to think differently about the Country I arrived on as a migrant when I was just two years older than Sadie. I visited places around Melbourne that carry cultural significance for the First Peoples of Victoria, but that I had never thought to look for before this trip. I saw trees scarred where people had taken wood for shields, visited parks and gardens which sit on the traditional lands of the Wurundjeri and Boonwurrung peoples and met a pair of cheeky sulphur crested cockatoos which live on a sacred ceremonial site near Albert Park in St Kilda.

With my brother, sister-in-law and Sadie, I took a trip to the ‘dinosaur dreaming’ site in Inverloch where we negotiated some pretty vague directions to locate a set of fossilised dinosaur footprints. When back in Melbourne, I walked along the cliffs surrounding the bay where I grew up looking for the old Aboriginal freshwater wells which sit around Beaumaris and Black Rock. I saw evidence of the middens, those accumulations of shells and other materials left along the shoreline of Port Phillip Bay that mark thousands of years of continuous life on Country. While walking along the coastline of the Mornington Peninsula, I stopped to look out towards ‘the rip’ and thought about how the Boonwurrung had at first believed the Europeans to be ancestors returning from the spirit world due to their pale skin, only to quickly realise that these men would not be returning to the Dreaming. What followed was a violent campaign of dispossession and genocide upon their peoples, and standing there on that coastline, that knowledge weighed on me heavily.

For the first time in more than twenty years I made it up to Sydney. Discovering this part of Australia was like opening up a treasure chest of history. Sitting in the reading rooms of the State Library of New South Wales, I engaged with materials that made the history of the First Fleet and its impact on communities all along the east coast feel much more immediate and confronting.

I walked through the Royal Botanic Gardens and tried to imagine what it might have felt like to watch those tall ships move into the harbour for the first time. I also visited Bondi, Botany Bay and Balmain and began to really connect with the geography of this harbour city which is full of hills and islands and inlets. I spent time visiting historic sites, museums and galleries while I listened to the stories of First Peoples from Gadigal Country and learned about how colonisation had played out in this area of Australia. For perhaps the first time, I experienced the city not as a visitor popping in for a long weekend with friends, but as someone trying to genuinely connect to country in a way I had never made the space for before.

I was also lucky enough to hop ‘over the ditch’ and spend three weeks traveling on the North Island of New Zealand. In addition to catching up with several friends, I immersed myself in colonial and Māori history and culture. I visited a Māori village in Rotorua where I had the remarkable experience of learning directly from two elders who spoke with me about cultural practices and beliefs, helping me begin to understand whakapapa, which sits at the core of traditional Māori knowledge. I walked up volcanic hills, visited monuments to Māori warriors, stood among geothermal landscapes that felt almost otherworldly and made my way to a lookout where I could stare across the water to Whakaari in the distance, a volcano made famous by the tragic eruption that killed and injured tourists who were visiting when it blew. Watching it puff quietly on the horizon, I found myself thinking about how rarely nature concerns itself with human plans, and how deeply out of sync with its patterns and cycles we seem to have fallen. I wondered whether the Māori would have read the signs before that eruption. I feel sure that they would have.

What those four months gave me was a sense of clarity. For a long time the stories of colonial Australia had felt abstract, distant in the way that histories feel when you haven’t made the conscious choice to engage with them. This time I refused to look away, even when what I learned broke my heart or filled me with rage. I read the Yoorook Justice report. I watched the Victorian Treaty pass through parliament. I attended an Invasion Day march and stood alongside people my own age listening as they talked about losing parents, children, family members and friends to ongoing colonial violence. Far from being historical events, they were present-tense realities, unfolding in front of all of us but often missing from the mainstream narratives of this nation.

I arrived in October thinking that I understood Australia’s history pretty well. I left four months later, understanding how much I had never known at all. Somewhere in between the reading and the walking and the listening, I was able to take the lenses of colonial history off and replace them with something more honest. Unexpectedly this started to grow a deeply fierce love for home, not the performative kind and not the version we sell to tourists or project in the media, but the kind that embraces the ugly, carries the grief of it and still sincerely hopes for a future in which we are not endlessly dragging the wounds of colonialism behind us.

I’m not quite ready to move back to Melbourne, but the trip gave me enough time to begin thinking seriously about what my purpose might be when I do. For now I’m back in Bangkok, waiting for the next chapter to begin. In a few weeks I’ll return to the classroom as an Early Years teacher, working with three, four and five-year-olds in a play-based inquiry setting. I haven’t focused on this age group for years, not since an early stint at an international school here in Bangkok where I had a kindergarten class of threes and fours. I’m looking forward to it more than I would have thought possible even five years ago, which is itself a sign of how much this year has changed me.

Part of that has to do with the time I spent this year simply watching children play, and specifically watching Sadie, who had turned one the day after I first arrived back in Melbourne. Watching her was like sitting in on a very long masterclass in how small humans process the world. Everything was a curiosity! She was deeply committed to sorting and organising, spending long stretches just stacking things, picking them up, assessing them, rejecting some and accepting others with a decisiveness that most adults have long since lost. I’d occasionally offer her something and she’d consider it seriously before either incorporating it into whatever system she had going or making it completely clear that she had things well in hand and didn’t need my assistance at all. There’s something both humbling and beautiful about that kind of focused, self-directed curiosity, and it reminded me in the most concrete way, why I wanted to teach young children in the first place.

Watching her, I kept thinking about another little girl who had once approached the world with exactly that kind of fearless, self-directed certainty and how long it had taken me to find my way back to her.

I have always been a writer, with an abundance of half-filled notebooks containing poems, thoughts, letters to people, letters to myself and ideas for stories and articles that I had never seriously considered sharing with anyone else. It was while I was in New Zealand that I found the courage to change that which makes me think that there is something about the power of Country, culture and connection that has a way of returning you to yourself. I began writing and publishing The Unlearning Project while I was still travelling, and when I returned to Australia I sat down to write the first chapter of my book - a chapter which will likely never be published, but which gave me the belief that I was absolutely capable of doing this. A well-published mentor had told me not long before I set off on my journey, 'Birg, you need to start publishing your writing now.' In New Zealand, I finally followed his advice.

As a ten-year-old I embraced writing without hesitation, churning out stories simply because I loved to write them and without giving a second thought to what anyone might think. Somewhere along the way that fearlessness quietly left me, which is probably a bit inevitable. I knew that the moment I began to share my writing publicly I was opening myself up in a way that I simply wasn’t ready for. What this year of writing and publishing has given me, beyond a body of work I am genuinely proud of, is the knowledge that I am ready now. I’m ready to put out ideas that will make some people uncomfortable, ready to shake up the status quo and not just be a voice lost in the noise of the growing culture wars coming in education, but one which helps to shape it. My fearless ten-year-old author is back.

Reflecting on all of this made me realise that perhaps the reason I couldn’t write last week is not that I had nothing to say, but that I had too much to say and none of it was ready. The year is ending, a new chapter is beginning, and before I launch into the next set of ideas and arguments and research rabbit holes, I needed a moment to look around and notice how much has changed. How much I’ve changed.

For me, this hasn’t been a gap year but a year of becoming. Now, for the first time in a long time, I have a genuine sense of where I’m heading next and the joy, the passion and the excitement for what comes next are real!

The course began a month and a half ago. On the first day, I sat in a classroom and learned how to say sawasdii ka (hello), chan chuu Birg (my name is Birg) and sabai dii mai ka? (how are you?). As I listened to my fellow students struggle with pronunciation and tones while reaching for vocabulary that wasn’t there yet, I quietly texted my Thai-Australian friend Jeab who I’ve known since we were five: OMG we’re learning how to say hello and I think I might be top of the class.

As I looked around at the faces of my classmates, most of them were wearing the particular expression of someone who suspects they may never quite get it. I recognised that feeling well. I had experienced all of the confusion and the struggle myself when I was newer to this place, but with one fundamental difference. When I first arrived, it was to a Bangkok where Google Translate didn’t exist, most apps were still years away from becoming reality, and where almost no one in the shops, cafes and supermarkets spoke English. If I wanted to order food, give directions to a taxi, pay an electricity bill or set up internet access I was lost.

I actually remember visiting a True Mobile store in Siam Square around a month after first arriving, so that I could try to set up my internet. I had zero fluency, my word choices were incredibly limited and my pronunciation was atrocious, and it was abundantly clear that the Thai staff were in the same boat when it came to their English. As a result, they had no idea what I was trying to communicate to them, and so passed me along from one colleague to another in the hope that someone might be able to help… or that I’d give up and leave.

In hindsight, what looked like confusion or an unwillingness to help was actually the exact opposite. It was the cultural importance of ‘saving face’ both for them and for me, which is something that to this day, many Thais work hard to avoid. While I understand this now, at the time I became so frustrated that I actually cried. I cannot tell you how uncomfortable this show of emotion was for these poor people to witness… western lady losing her shit in public, super unThai behaviour. However, in many ways, these moments also taught me the importance of making sure I had enough conversational Thai so that I could negotiate my life here with less frustration and stress - for everyone!

What I didn’t do throughout all the years that followed however, was ever fully learn to read or write the language. I actually tried. I really did! In typical Birg-style I purchased books on how to learn Thai, practiced writing the characters and gave learning the sounds a genuine crack. What became clear fairly quickly though, was that the complexity of Thai vowels in particular requires the support of an actual teacher who knows what they are doing, and I did not have one. Like me, Jeab was educated in Australia and while she speaks the language fluently, she can’t read and write Thai either.

I remember meeting a guy from Sydney years ago who declared, with great confidence, that he had taught himself Thai on his plane ride over. I remember thinking to myself, what a load of rubbish. With 44 consonants, 32 vowels and 5 tones, this is a genuinely difficult language to master, even when accounting for my many years of being immersed in it.

What I did have in the place of formal instruction, was my immediate social connection through Jeab and her husband Ou, to their family and friends. I still remember sitting at the dinner table with Jeab and Ou’s extended family one evening, while they proceeded to teach me how to swear like a sailor. Each time that I repeated an obscenity, they’d kill themselves laughing. They were very careful to add the caveat that I should never use these words with people I did not know very, very well. Despite the hilarity of the moment I was mildly miffed at the time, because what I’d actually asked them to teach me were words for more mundane things like numbers, plate, glass, table and chair.

But those more risque lessons would later come in very handy indeed! Shortly after arriving in Bangkok, I got my first job at a small international school where I taught primary English. Like most kids anywhere, my students enjoyed taking their obscenities out for a spin in the playground, where they operated under the reasonable assumption that their western teachers had no idea what they were saying. More than once I have stopped mid-stride to say Puud a-rai na? Chan kao jai dai ka! (what did you say? I can understand you!) and watched their faces fall before breaking into the wry smile of someone who has just quietly recalibrated their teacher. They would walk off saying Kao puud pasa Thai (she speaks Thai), and I would feel that small, particular satisfaction of having earned something that cannot be handed to you.

During my time here, I have found that the overwhelming majority of people who move to Thailand never truly learn to speak the language at all. I regularly find myself translating for friends who have been here for years, some even longer than me. There is a version of this that is completely understandable because life is busy and the majority of my friends work in international schools where English is the language of instruction. These days, English also gets you far enough in most places and as I’ve already mentioned, the Thai language is genuinely hard.

Having said this, I also think that there is something worth examining about the ease with which many westerners settle into this country and simply never bother to learn even basic day-to-day phrases, while simultaneously holding some fairly strong opinions about those migrants living within their own countries who struggle to master English. The colonial mindset does not always announce itself loudly. Sometimes it just looks like never having learned to count in the language of the place that has given you a home.

Here is something that takes time to name properly: being functionally illiterate in a language you live amongst is a quiet kind of disempowerment. Over time that disempowerment accumulates while you develop strategies that help you to navigate around it. You become more observant of the world around you out of the necessity to memorise landmarks, because you are unable to read the street signs. You find yourself seeking out familiar logos which can orient you, instead of needing to read instructions or understand announcements. You gradually develop workarounds that become so habitual that you eventually stop noticing the gaps that they’re filling. You learn to manage and eventually, familiarity forms a kind of cocoon which makes you forget how disconnected you are from the world which you inhabit every day.

Last week though, as I approached the motorcycle taxi rank, I realised that I could read the names of the destinations printed on their sign and understand what it should cost for a ride. Suddenly, I was hit with the knowledge that I’d been being overcharged for over a decade! It was the happiest experience of being ripped off I have ever felt! Now I can gently correct the price next time I’m overquoted by my driver. A few days later, I sounded out the name of a shop near my house. I’m now looking at licence plates as I commute from place to place, using each one as an opportunity to practice my consonants instead of looking at my phone. Each one of these moments might be small by itself, however to me they feel profound and empowering - for the first time ever I am beginning to actually read Bangkok and the joy this brings has left a permanent smile on my face!

I am a highly literate person with a book collection which takes up an entire wall of my apartment. Not only this, but language is my professional instrument. I am a qualified English and History teacher, I studied French through secondary school and at university, took Japanese for several years and hold a minor qualification in linguistics. Words, in the languages I know, are tools which I wield with confidence and which make me feel deeply connected to the world. To have been surrounded for so long by a written language that I couldn’t access was, I have begun to realise, a form of isolation through which I have sacrificed a fundamental part of who I am in order to exist in this place. Starting to dismantle that, even at the level of vowels and consonants, has already begun to change how I experience this city.

I have never been so excited, in my life, to learn how to spell.

This week, after weeks of learning consonants, we are finally moving onto vowels. For me, this is where things in the classroom are getting interesting, not just linguistically but pedagogically as well. Our teacher, Kru Gee, drew a line in the sand last week. Those who had not passed their consonant test were told, gently but plainly, “you should consider going back to the beginning of the course. What comes next will be increasingly difficult to keep up with if the foundations are not there.”

I could hear teachers everywhere responding to that… if only we had that option.

The reality is that in compulsory educational settings, we rarely do. Students arrive in our schools and stay for years. Because of this, repetition, revision and differentiation become the scaffolding upon which everything is constructed. We don’t get to send anyone back to the beginning when we can see that they are not ready to move on. But Kru Gee’s situation also illuminates something that is genuinely easy to lose sight of when you’re the one standing at the front of the room. Pacing, rather than being a failure of teaching, is a necessary feature of learning. I think we all accept that not everyone moves at the same speed, but the reasons underpinning this are rarely simple.

In my own class, the range of learning habits I see each day is striking. One classmate, who has been in Thailand for less than six months, has appointed herself the pronunciation authority for the room. She corrects others with the confidence of someone who does not yet know what she doesn’t know, meanwhile her own pronunciation is frequently wrong. Another has, on more than one occasion, stopped Kru Gee mid-lesson to explain Thai culture back to her. Several classmates barely speak at all and look visibly terrified every time we’re asked to do group work. One thinks that saying something louder will make it more correct, while another still cannot reliably identify 90% of the consonants after six weeks of going over them in class. New people arrive while old ones quietly disappear. Some turn up having done nothing, while others arrive clearly having done everything.

What explains the vast differences, especially amongst a group who has chosen to do this work? I have been thinking about this in relation to my own position in the room, because it is clear to me that while I am doing really well, this is not simply because I am talented with languages or because I have been more dedicated to studying than my classmates. I have identified three significant factors in play when it comes to my success so far, and only one of them is genuinely within my control.

The first is the huge difference in prior experience which I have when compared to most of my classmates. I began these lessons with years of informal Thai already absorbed - I knew most of the vocabulary, I understood the rhythm and had a solid grasp of the context in which many words are used. An overwhelming amount of what the class has covered so far has been revision for me, which means that I am not learning from scratch so much as acquiring the structure and rules for things which I already half-knew. This is an enormous privilege, and it is one that classmates who have been here only a few months simply do not share. It would be dishonest to attribute my progress to effort without naming that.

The second is making learning a habit by prioritizing daily practice. I know my consonants not because I arrived with them, but because I have revised them every day. For at least 30 minutes, I have spent time reading, writing and matching them to their pictures. I even dug out my old flashcards which I had not looked at in perhaps a decade and found, to my satisfaction, that roughly half of them had simply been waiting for me to remember them again. (A timely sign that no learning is ever wasted!)

The third is my linguistic background. To qualify as a secondary English teacher, I was required to complete a minor in the study of linguistics which means, among other things, that I have a solid foundation in the international phonetic alphabet. This is incredibly useful when learning pronunciation, especially when it comes to sounds that don’t exist in English. Languages also make sense to me in a structural way. Because I fundamentally understand how grammar and sentence structures work, how sound systems operate and how writing systems encode meaning, bringing this to a new language feels less challenging. Most of my classmates do not arrive with that particular toolkit and that makes a huge difference. Just today, we were learning about where tongue and mouth position should be to pronounce Thai vowels correctly and I could literally feel the confusion permeating the room.

There is one more thing this experience has given me and it is the one I expected the least.

Because most of my classmates know I have been here for fifteen years, I have become the unofficial first port of call for questions - all the things people feel more comfortable asking a fellow student than the teacher, quietly come my way. Honestly, I try to help where I can, but I also find myself frequently saying “check with Kru Gee, because I am probably saying it wrong.” I have picked up bad habits from years of learning by ear which means my word order is sometimes lazy or the words I use are totally wrong. My pronunciation carries the fingerprints of guesswork accumulated over a long time. I know enough Thai to know how much of it I am getting wrong, which is a particular kind of knowledge that only arrives after you’ve spent years messing it up in the first place.

This is where the real unlearning in this process has been for me. I came into this class as the most experienced speaker in the room and have ended up occupying the strange position of being the student who knows the most, but is simultaneously most aware of how big my own gaps are. I am being asked to revise not just vocabulary and grammar, but a plethora of bad habits. Ways of speaking that have worked well enough for years are now being gently taken apart and corrected.

As teachers, we rarely get to be students. While we engage in plenty of professional development, we approach this learning from an elevated starting point in that we arrive with skills, frameworks and confidence already intact. Our students who arrive in international school classrooms without strong English, or any English at all, and are then dropped into a language environment that is not their own, do not have that luxury. They find themselves where I was in my first weeks in Bangkok, except they didn’t choose to be there. That absence of choice is not a small thing

and the disengagement we so often witness in our classrooms is frequently its most visible consequence.

Sitting in this classroom, week after week, has helped me understand all of this in a way that years of professional development never quite managed. You cannot fully understand what it costs a student who feels totally overwhelmed and lost in a language, until you have been lost in one yourself. Not briefly or theoretically lost either, but existing in that darkness for long enough that you start to build a life around an acceptance of not-knowing.

Learning to read has not completely fixed that yet, but it has definitely started to.

I started writing this piece weeks ago but was reminded to finish it after reading some amazing articles by other Substack writers on the topic of speaking multiple languages. Having the ability to move between places, languages and cultures is something which breaks down many of the barriers thrown up between us as people of the world. If you have had an experience of how bilingualism, trilingualism and beyond has helped you see the world through different lenses, I would love to hear about it!

Having been bitten twice by white-tails over the years, my fear has metastasized into what I would call a healthy sense of paranoia. One of those bites happened in Australia a few years ago. I woke up in the middle of the night, feeling something crawling along at the nape of my neck. In what was almost certainly a wildly jerky and awkward moment, I aggressively swiped it off with the back of my hand. Jumping out of bed and turning the light on, I saw a large white-tail on the carpet beside me.

While I don’t usually advocate for killing spiders, right then my instincts took over. Doing what I imagine most Aussies would do in this situation, I grabbed my nearby thong1 and finished it off. The bite it left on the back of my neck was incredibly itchy and still flares up occasionally when my body is under stress.

Growing up in Australia means that spiders aren’t a rarity, they’re literally everywhere. We find many different species in our gardens, lurking around our sheds and sometimes even taking a swim in the pool. They enjoy making webs on our washing lines which means they also make their way into our washing baskets, and occasionally they crawl into bed with us too. We live alongside them whether we like it or not.

Australia is a land of spiders.

Yet, despite all of this, I find them totally fascinating. I have sat and watched as a daddy-long-legs makes a meal out of a house spider. When huntsmen have found their way inside the house, I’ve often affectionately named them ‘Harry’ or ‘Henrietta’, something most of us tend to do in Australia. I love seeing the symmetry of a web catching the morning sunlight. The intricate architecture of their bodies is more perfectly designed than anything human hands could produce. On top of that, the sheer variety of species and the fact that these creatures have survived for hundreds of millions of years, and continue to thrive almost everywhere on Earth, is both mind boggling and humbling. It is safe to say that I find spiders unsettling and beautiful at the same time.

There are plenty of spiders in Thailand too, although in Bangkok I don’t seem to come across them very often. This week though, I found a tiny little spider web in one of my balcony plants and as I looked closely at its perfectly miniature architecture, I found myself thinking about Robert Frost’s poem Design.

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth--
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth--
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?—
If design govern in a thing so small.

The poem is not one of his more cheerful works, but it is one that stayed with me. Frost begins with a simple observation: a white spider on a white flower holding a white moth. He notices a pattern and starts asking questions. Was it a coincidence? Was it convergence? Or was it something more? I feel like the poem becomes increasingly unsettling because Frost never quite settles on an answer. Instead, he sits with the uncertainty, following the questions wherever they lead.

That feels familiar and the more I thought about it, the more the connections in my thinking began to emerge.

The web in front of me stopped being just a physical structure. It told a story of mathematics and symmetry, of biology and evolution. It was a tiny wonder of engineering and design. It connected me to both storytelling and metaphor - the spider has featured in cultural narratives around the world as a powerful symbol of good, of evil and often, of wisdom.

It also reminded me that indigenous peoples across the globe have used spiders as a way of observing, connecting to, and sharing knowledge of the natural world over tens of thousands of years, by paying close attention to these tiny creatures that share Country with us. A single spider and its web has been quietly connecting literature, science, mathematics, history and culture.

That’s when I realised that my own thoughts about the spider and its web were starting to form a metaphor of my own.

One of the most persistent misconceptions about inquiry-based learning is that it lacks rigour. I’ve heard many dismiss it as ‘just play’ or express the concern that inquiry is about children simply following their interests without any genuine direction or discipline. My experience, both as a teacher and as a learner, has been the exact opposite. Inquiry doesn’t reduce rigour. It takes it to a whole new level of engagement.

When we genuinely inquire into something, we rarely remain neatly inside a single topic or subject area. Instead, inquiry requires us to move between disciplines, to make connections between a range of skills and knowledge and most importantly, it invites us to bring our prior understandings, experiences and questions along with us. Learning becomes richer because it relates more closely to the reality of how human brains process the information we gather about the world around us. That world is not organised into curriculum boxes.

I have seen inquiry in action every time my students discover one of the tiny jumping spiders which inhabit their school playgrounds. Unlike the white-tails that have created my paranoia over spiders in Australia, these little guys seem almost friendly. The children become mesmerised by them, leaning in to examine them with curiosity and wonder in their expressions.

Then the questions start flying almost immediately: Why do they jump? How many different kinds are there? Do spiders sleep? What do they eat? Are there spiders in every country? Before long we’re wandering into deep discussions about ecosystems, adaptation, geography, behaviour and classification. Nobody has announced that playtime just became a science lesson. Nobody has informed the children that their questions have wandered into biology. They’re simply doing what children do naturally and following their curiosity.

The point of inquiry isn’t walking away holding all of the answers. The point of inquiry is refusing to stop asking the questions that intrigue us.

That idea followed me into my own learning this week. I had originally planned to write about a topic that I thought I understood pretty well. I’ve been researching covert global power structures and, at some point this week, became convinced that I had found a connection between a historical organisation and a more modern one operating insidiously in Australian life right now. Like Frost, I had noticed a pattern. At least, I thought I had.

The more closely I examined the evidence, however, the more apparent it became that I had misunderstood what I was looking at. The connection wasn’t what I thought it was at all. For a moment, I felt frustrated. Then curiosity took over. If these things weren’t connected in the way I’d assumed, what was I missing? What other questions needed asking? What did the evidence actually suggest?

The roadblock wasn’t a sign that inquiry had failed. It was inquiry working exactly as intended, moving me from observation to pattern recognition to harder questions. The real challenge wasn’t finding an answer. It was resisting the temptation to force the evidence to fit the story I had already constructed.

As a historian, this feels familiar. As my friends and family would freely tell you, I hold plenty of strong views. I make judgements. I reach conclusions. I am as capable of bias as anyone else. The difference is that history has taught me to leave room for those conclusions to change. To be a ‘truth-teller’, every interpretation needs to remain open to challenge and every argument open to revision in the face of new evidence. Inquiry demands exactly the same thing. It asks us to sit with discomfort. To embrace complexity. To tolerate uncertainty. To acknowledge when we are wrong and to keep going until we find the truth.

That realisation struck me once more as I worked with some classmates during a Thai lesson a few days ago. We were practising simple conversational questions, one of which was: What books do you enjoy reading? One member of the group replied, “I only read the Bible.” I won’t lie, my reaction was slightly stunned - not because she was religious. I have plenty of friends who are deeply religious; some attend Bible study groups, others Quran study groups, many read sacred texts regularly. What struck me about this response wasn’t the intensity of her faith at all. Rather, it was being confronted with the concept of relying on just one religious text in order to shape an identity and form a view of the complex world that we all share.

As a historian, teacher and former librarian, I found myself struggling to make sense of it. Both my personal and professional lives have been built around a very different set of assumptions: that understanding grows when we engage with multiple sources, perspectives and experiences; that it is our responsibility to one another to develop compassion by honouring a range of stories and beliefs; and that learning only truly happens when we are open to examining our own assumptions through comparison, contradiction, corroboration and dialogue.

A worldview which is built while relying on a single source produces an inflexible and narrow thread. Inquiry on the other hand, builds webs.

Perhaps that is why inquiry feels so important at this particular moment in the history of humanity. We are living through a period of polarisation and increasing certainty as we divide ourselves accordingly into tribes - political tribes, ideological tribes, religious tribes, algorithmic tribes. Everywhere we look, there are forces encouraging us to retreat into familiar narratives and to invest our loyalty in communities which feel ideologically ‘safe’.

Yet the innately human condition of empathy requires us to encounter perspectives beyond our own. Belonging requires us to understand people whose experiences differ from ours. Democracy requires citizens who are not only capable of questioning information, but who can evaluate a range of evidence and use this to revise their existing views when new facts emerge - even when those facts may upset what we previously believed to be true. None of this is possible without engaging in the process of inquiry. None of it happens without cultivating a sense of curiosity about the world and its inhabitants. Critically, none of it happens if we resolve to abandon inquiry the second it throws up anything which makes us uncomfortable.

Once again, this brings me to another story about an encounter with a spider. Almost fifteen years ago, while standing in front of a classroom in London, I held a tarantula. This was absolutely not a personal choice, but one I made because my students had decided that I was the bravest teacher in the room and so had nominated me to do it. They didn’t know that this was one of my greatest fears, but rather than making a fuss, I sucked it up and allowed its owner to gently place her in my hand.

What surprised me wasn’t that I survived the encounter without totally losing it in front of my Year 7s and 8s - it was what I noticed. She was much heavier than I expected her to be. When she moved across my hands, I could feel each tiny footstep through the sticky little pads at the end of each one of her legs. She wasn’t actually that scary at all, in fact, she was gentle. Careful. Almost sweet. While that experience hasn’t removed my fear, it absolutely changed my relationship with it.

That’s what inquiry offers us. We don’t always walk away with certainty, it doesn’t always bring us comfort, and we definitely don’t always find neat or easy answers. Instead, embracing inquiry leads us to developing a deeper understanding of the things that unsettle us. It cultivates the courage to keep asking questions. It helps us to develop the humility to acknowledge when we are wrong, and to change our minds. Most importantly, it reminds us that having the willingness to follow the thread a little further is what truly opens up the world around us.

The spider, the poem, the students, the research roadblock, the woman in my Thai class - they all point to the same lesson. Learning is not about finding a single answer and holding onto it forever.

It’s about weaving a stronger web. One connection at a time.

“I constantly reassess my views in the light of the evidence and I wish other people operated in the same way.” — Avi Shlaim, Iraqi-Jewish historian

For most Australians, Pine Gap exists somewhere between reality and mythology.

It’s sat in the centre of our country since the 1960s, cloaked in secrecy and hovering at the edge of Australian public consciousness. Despite its incredible significance to global intelligence networks, Pine Gap has barely appeared in popular culture. Unlike the Pentagon in the USA or MI6 in the UK, it exists more as a shadow than a recognisable institution.

Most Australians recognise the name but far fewer could tell you what actually goes on there, and those who can are not permitted to.

We do know that Pine Gap provides critical satellite data and intelligence to the Five Eyes intelligence network - Australia, New Zealand, Canada, The UK and The USA. We know it is jointly operated by Australian and American defense and intelligence agencies, although it is almost entirely funded by the USA. We know that it has played a role in foreign wars - wars Australians have often protested against in their millions. We also know through recent reporting, that the base is being used to share intelligence with the IDF and the US military in Iran and, most likely, in Gaza and Southern Lebanon too.

What we do not know is pretty much anything beyond that. While we can speculate and piece together fragments, the moment anyone in a position of actual knowledge pushes for anything resembling accountability, they hit a wall.

When Penny Wong was recently asked directly whether Pine Gap played a role in recent events in Iran, she refused to comment.

That is not her being cagey and it isn’t just a politician deflecting an uncomfortable question. If Wong discloses anything about Pine Gap’s operations, she can be imprisoned. She knows what happens there and she cannot tell us. Meanwhile, we are not supposed to find that as deeply disturbing as it actually is.

While I have known all of this for years, what I did not know - what I had no real framework for understanding until I spent the past week reading Whitney Webb’s One Nation Under Blackmail - was why.

Not the legal why, the historical why. The why that explains how we arrived at a point where a foreign-run intelligence facility operating on Australian soil, without the permission of the Arrernte traditional custodians but with the full cooperation of the Australian government, sits so far outside democratic accountability. So far outside it, in fact, that even our own Foreign Minister can’t openly discuss its operations without risking imprisonment.

Australian researchers and journalists including Richard Tanter at the Nautilus organisation, and Peter Cronau and Alex Barwick at the ABC, have done some important reporting on Pine Gap. However, what I found myself searching for were deeper explanations of how facilities like Pine Gap had historically been used by American intelligence agencies, beyond the handful of operations the public already knows about.

That search is what eventually led me to Webb’s book. I picked it up confident that I’d find deeper context around the CIA, covert operations and the broader intelligence networks surrounding American power.

I was looking for partial answers to specifically Australian questions.

I was not prepared for what I found.

Before I continue though, I want to say something about history itself because this piece is almost entirely about that.

I am a historian at heart. I studied and earned a history degree and I have taught the subject to both primary and secondary students. For as long as I can remember my reading interests have lived almost entirely in the gripping reality of non-fiction. History, politics, media studies and just about any other title, through which I could immerse myself in the narratives about who we are as humans, as a nation, and as a global community.

In the past six months I have begun sharing this process of ‘unlearning’ through my blog, and many of the articles I have researched and written will, it is hoped, contribute to a book. So when I picked up Volume One of Webb’s historical analysis, I brought with me what I considered pretty solid foundational knowledge - of American political history, of intelligence agencies and their operations, of the Middle East, of Australia’s role in the global intelligence community. I knew the world was a complicated and often brutal place, but I also thought I understood, broadly, how power operated.

I was wrong.

The British-Israeli historian Avi Shlaim has said that he “constantly reassesses [his] views in the light of evidence and wishes other people operated the same way”. That instinct - to follow the evidence even when it overturns what you thought you knew - is the core of what it means to do history with integrity. The people who benefit most from official versions of history are counting on most of us never seriously questioning them.

History often gets a bad reputation. People find it, in a word, boring. I suspect that part of that feeling comes from the way we are taught history in our schools: disconnected units, endless facts and dates, and learning activities stripped of the human stories and contexts that breathed meaning into them in the first place. But when historians work with genuine integrity, what we are doing is truth-telling. We follow the evidence wherever it leads, often into stories that unsettle and overturn what we thought we knew - into the shadows and gaps between what we were told happened and what the historical record reveals later on.

Webb’s One Nation Under Blackmail is history of the truth-telling kind. Her work is exhaustively sourced, forensically documented and, in many places, genuinely earth-shattering for anyone who thinks they have a reasonable grip on the world after the end of World War II. It is not a conspiracy theory, it is a documented reckoning with the gap between the official story and the evidentiary record - a gap that turns out to be vast, deliberate and still very much with us today.

A pivotal moment in Australian history that began to look very different to me after reading Webb’s work, was the dismissal of Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in 1975.

Most Australians know who Gough Whitlam was. There is an iconic Australian band named after him, he remains tied in many people’s minds to the social and cultural shifts of the 1970s and over time, he has taken on an almost mythological status in Australian political history.

What I suspect far fewer Australians could actually explain clearly though, is what Whitlam’s government stood for, what he was attempting to change or what was really happening politically in the lead-up to his dismissal in 1975. Fewer still would be able to tell you that the Governor-General who dismissed him was a man named John Kerr.

The version many of us have absorbed, consciously or otherwise, is that Whitlam’s dismissal was fundamentally a domestic political crisis. Australia was dealing with severe economic instability during the global stagflation crisis of the 1970s, a period of rising prices and economic anxiety that probably feels pretty familiar right now. Whitlam’s political opponents blocked the passage of budget bills needed for the government to keep functioning. Governor-General John Kerr then stepped in and removed him from office, using constitutional powers which no Governor-General had ever seriously contemplated invoking before.

This is the official story. It is the one I learned as a history student at university, sitting in the lecture theatre of my Australian history professor Nick Economou, who I am certain got as animated about this period as he did about everything else - Whitlam was his hero. But I was eighteen and it didn't feel especially relevant to my life. What I know now is that even the most engaged and rigorous historians were likely working with an incomplete picture - because the full picture was deliberately kept from them too.

What Whitlam was also doing in the years leading up to his dismissal was asking direct questions about Pine Gap and the extent of American intelligence activity operating inside Australia. In 1972, he’d campaigned on ‘lifting the lid’ of secrecy surrounding the facility, so that Australians would better understand what was happening on their own soil. His concerns deepened further, after the US military placed its global bases on red alert during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war without properly informing the Australian government beforehand, despite Pine Gap’s strategic significance and an agreement that the US would give advance warning of an escalation.

At the same time, Whitlam was rapidly pulling Australian foreign policy away from automatic alignment with American Cold War priorities. His government had ended conscription, recognised China and North Vietnam, publicly criticised aspects of US foreign policy and signalled that Australia would pursue a more independent path internationally.

By 1974, Whitlam was openly threatening to discontinue the Pine Gap lease agreement, a move which reportedly sent shockwaves through American intelligence and defence circles. He had begun describing CIA involvement in Australian affairs as “a threat to our national sovereignty” and was increasingly pushing for transparency around operations which the agency had no intention of publicly explaining.

Within months of making those intentions clear, he was removed from office through an archaic constitutional power that had never been used by a Governor-General before and has not been used since.

Webb, it turns out, is simply the latest to show evidence that connects Kerr to intelligence-linked organisations before his appointment as Governor-General. Australian journalist John Pilger also details how Christopher Boyce, one of the American operators responsible for decoding signals intelligence connected to Pine Gap, and someone who was in a position to have direct knowledge of intelligence operations at the time, stated explicitly that the CIA was involved in Whitlam’s removal. Kerr was referred to in CIA corridors as “our man Kerr.”

Not everyone accepted those claims. Kim Beazley, who later became Deputy Prime Minister and was himself a member of Whitlam’s Labor Party, publicly dismissed allegations of CIA involvement as “scuttlebutt,” insisting he’d had the claims investigated and found nothing substantial. Yet both Pilger and Webb’s reporting presents a very different picture and draws on sources which directly challenge that dismissal.

This is not some fringe speculation. The possibility of intelligence involvement in Whitlam’s dismissal has been raised by serious Australian historians, debated in academic contexts and revisited repeatedly over the decades. What Webb’s work does is place those events within a much broader international intelligence architecture, one which raises deeply uncomfortable questions about how embedded American, Israeli and intelligence-linked influence may already have been, within both sides of Australian politics by the mid-1970s.

The official story about 1975 was that Whitlam’s dismissal was a ‘constitutional crisis’ over the budget. The deeper story is that it was a CIA and MI6-backed coup against a democratically elected Prime Minister. Why? Because he was trying to assert Australian sovereignty in ways that threatened the interests of the foreign intelligence architecture operating inside our borders.

Australia has arguably never been the same since.

Around the very same period that Whitlam was being removed from office in Australia, another political scandal was consuming Washington: Watergate.

The story of Watergate is possibly one of my all-time favourite political narratives. It brings together history, politics, journalism and wraps them inside a David vs Goliath tale of underdog reporters. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein are our heroes, stumbling onto something enormous; something no one else seemed to be taking seriously. Like me, you might picture the Washington Post, Deep Throat, the parking garage, or the film itself - Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman turning journalism into something almost mythological. The story of American democracy’s finest hour of constitutional self-correction.

That story is not completely false. Nixon did resign. The reporting did happen. But Webb’s research raises a question that reframes the entire episode: what were the burglars actually trying to retrieve from the Watergate complex?

The official answer - political intelligence useful for the 1972 election - never fully made sense. Nixon was going to win that election in a landslide regardless which makes the burglary and the explanation Americans were given for it just didn’t add up.

What Webb documents, sourced through court records and congressional testimony, is that the Watergate complex housed evidence connected to a prostitution and blackmail operation targeting Washington’s political elite. The cover-up that consumed the Nixon presidency was not primarily about protecting a failed burglary operation or campaign sabotage effort. It was about protecting something far more serious and, when viewed from 2026, something all too familiar: an organised web of sexual compromise and blackmail operating directly inside the centres of political power, intelligence and organised crime.

What also becomes difficult to ignore is how deeply intelligence networks sat around the story itself. Bob Woodward had a Naval Intelligence background and had previously reported directly to senior intelligence officials - context which remains largely absent from his official biographies. The initial tip about the burglary came through his editor Howard Simons, who received it from Joseph Califano, a politically connected lawyer who had bridged CIA and Army circles.

The question Webb leaves hanging is difficult to shake: how did a relatively junior reporter gain the extraordinary access and institutional protection required to publish what he published, and why did the reporting expose just enough to bring down Nixon while leaving the deeper blackmail architecture entirely intact?

Watergate wasn’t the system working, rather it was evidence of a struggle between rival intelligence-linked factions operating inside the same political machinery which they’d created together. While one side used journalists with the right connections to bring down a President, the deeper architecture of blackmail, compromise and covert influence continued operating entirely untouched.

This matters because Watergate has been used for fifty years as proof that US democratic accountability functions. If that proof is built on only a partial telling of the story, then we need to ask what the full story reveals about the systems still operating around political power today.

Webb’s central argument in Volume One, documented through exhaustive primary source research, is this: the postwar American political and intelligence establishment was built on foundations that included, from the very beginning, the active participation of organised crime networks. Not as an occasional corruption of otherwise clean institutions but as a structural feature.

The pivotal figure here is Meyer Lansky - the organised crime financier whose network connected American gambling and drug money to US intelligence operations, to the financing of covert wars and, critically, to the financial foundations of the state of Israel. Lansky wasn’t adjacent to these worlds, he was simultaneously inside all of them. He sat at the intersection of the mob, the CIA, the FBI and Zionist fundraising networks, in ways that were not incidental but operational.

The offshore banking archipelago that processed this money, Geneva, Beirut, Hong Kong, the Bahamas, Panama, the Cayman Islands, the City of London, Liberia, reads at times less like twentieth century financial history, and more like the itinerary for a deeply paranoid spy novel. Except that Webb shows that this infrastructure was not only real, but that these same networks simultaneously serviced organised crime capital, CIA black budgets and Israeli state financing. The same funnels. The same operators. The same discreet little club of untouchable tax havens.

The blackmail architecture ran through all of it. Sexual compromise as a control mechanism, what intelligence services call a honeypot operation, appears throughout Webb’s documentation as a recurring and deliberate method of controlling powerful men. The process is brutally simple: place someone in a compromising situation, document it and voila! Suddenly their decisions, loyalties and silence no longer fully belong to them.

Webb documents versions of this methodology operating as far back as the Prohibition era and, in some cases, even earlier.

Roy Cohn’s operations in the 1950s are among the earliest and most explicit examples. Cohn, the architect of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunt hearings and a man who built his career prosecuting others for the same homosexual acts that he himself engaged in privately, ran influence operations that used sexual compromise to collect leverage over politicians, judges and public figures.

He was a fixer, an operator, and a direct link between organised crime, the FBI under Hoover, and New York’s political elite. Cohn was also, for years, the mentor and political tutor of a young Manhattan property developer named Donald Trump. That lineage is direct and extensively documented.

From Cohn, the pattern of sexual blackmail runs outward into later scandals which, while distinct from one another, are shown by Webb to be deeply interconnected. The corridors of secret power were hard at work, perfecting the same underlying architecture of compromise and containment.

The congressional page scandals of the 1980s showed this same pattern at work. Members of the United States Congress were found to have engaged in sexual relationships with both male and female teenage pages - a scandal that was politically contained with remarkable speed before it could go anywhere uncomfortable.

The Franklin affair was where containment became harder. Named after the financial institution at the heart of the scandal in Nebraska, allegations emerged of a nationwide child trafficking network and blackmail ring with connections reaching all the way up into the Reagan-era White House. Investigations were launched and testimony was taken, yet instead of the alleged network being publicly dismantled, witnesses were aggressively discredited, parts of the investigation collapsed under political and legal pressure, and several of the young accusers themselves ultimately faced prosecution for supposedly fabricating their claims. A documentary examining the Franklin affair was completed for the Discovery Channel in 1994 and then pulled before broadcast at the last minute. Only a single copy survived.

From there, suddenly Jeffrey Epstein - the most recent, most sophisticated, and most international iteration of the same architecture, begins to make more sense. Far from being a lone predator, he was simply the latest model of an operation that had been running, refining itself and demonstrating its untouchability for half a century.

Epstein was not an anomaly. Epstein was continuity.

The architecture Webb documents evolved, modernised and extended its reach after the postwar period - including into Australia, which has never been peripheral to this story. Pine Gap is not a relic. It is an active and critical part of the same intelligence infrastructure Webb traces from its origins. The Five Eyes network itself can be understood as the institutional continuation of an Anglo-American imperial project that never actually ended - it just became more covert, more technological and more globally integrated.

Now shift that lens to what is happening in Australia in 2026.

ASIO's powers have recently been expanded, through legislation rushed through Parliament with remarkably little public debate. This was despite critics arguing that several of the provisions are written broadly enough, that they could be weaponised against legitimate and democratic forms of political dissent. We’re increasingly seeing that concern become reality.

Recently a Palestinian activist was harassed by multiple police, dressed in full riot gear outside a Bunnings in Rose Bay. He’d been buying supplies for a job he was on nearby, when at least five cars turned up and surrounded him, questioning him on what he was doing in the area - he was wearing a kaffiyeh. A Palestinian-Australian teenager was removed from the cover of Bayside Magazine for wearing a necklace of ancient Palestine - the land of her own cultural heritage. A NSW woman had her door broken down at 5am by a militarised police raid, over an alleged water bottle throwing incident at the recent protest against the visit of Israeli Prime Minister Isaac Hertzog. A man whose nation is facing genocide charges at the International Court of Justice was welcomed with diplomatic honours, while Australians who protested his visit faced Police brutality and serious legal consequences.

A Royal Commission into antisemitism, explicitly sought by Zionist lobby organisations and funded by Australian taxpayer money, is now proceeding with government support. While genuine antisemitism and anti-Jewish violence are absolutely real and deserve serious attention, critics argue that the Commission’s framing and processes have marginalised Palestinian perspectives and anti-Zionist Jewish voices alike. This has made it feel less like a broad inquiry into racism, and more like an attempt to establish legal and institutional frameworks, that will make criticism of Israeli state policy increasingly costly in Australia.

Meanwhile, Anthony Albanese has dismissed a Royal Commission into violence against women - something Australians have been calling for with over 91,000 signatures on an official petition - as unnecessary. In his own words, a Royal Commission just “funds the lawyers.”

Israel gets a Royal Commission, Australian women get a dismissal.

The parallel here is not subtle. The women abused in Epstein’s network - and in each iteration before it - have been dismissed and silenced for decades, while the men who used them continue to face no consequences. Australian women dying at the hands of partners and family members are told their deaths don’t warrant the same institutional attention as the lobbying priorities of a foreign government. They may be different contexts but they share the same logic: certain lives and certain suffering count, while others do not. Meanwhile, the people deciding who is heard and who is not, are the same people who have been deciding that for a very long time.

Anthony Albanese himself is a curious example of how power can reshape political language. In 2003, he was on record arguing against giving Israel free rein in Palestine and spent decades publicly supporting Palestinian rights. Since becoming Prime Minister however, that position has shifted dramatically. It may not have disappeared entirely, but it has softened, narrowed and recalibrated in ways that raise difficult questions about what pressures operate around political power once someone reaches its highest levels.

Penny Wong, once regarded by many as one of the more principled voices in Australian foreign policy, also appears increasingly constrained by the realities of power. While she continues to advocate for Palestinian recognition rhetorically, her public positioning on Israel and Gaza has shifted markedly toward diplomatic deference and strategic caution.

I am not in a position to state what has brought about these reversals. What I can say is that Webb’s research documents, in exhaustive detail, exactly how the intelligence architecture she describes has historically produced precisely this kind of transformation in political figures who encounter it at close range. The surveillance capabilities are real. The leverage operations are documented. The pattern of politicians who arrive in power with progressive foreign policy positions and quietly abandon them is not unique to Australia.

The mechanism Webb documents has a name - mutually assured destruction. You know things about them and they know things about you. From that point on you are, whatever your original intentions, inside the architecture.

What you are watching in Australian politics right now, the ASIO expansions, the RC, the arrests, the diplomatic reversals, is not a series of unrelated policy decisions. It is the architecture expressing itself locally.

On Australia Day this year, I joined the Invasion Day rally in Melbourne. Police were present with professional video equipment, recording faces. At the time I noticed it and filed it away as interesting. Having spent the past week reading Webb, I understand it differently now. That footage feeds into a surveillance infrastructure whose direct lineage runs from something Webb documents in detail - a piece of software called PROMIS.

In the early 1980s, the US Department of Justice working with the Israeli government, stole a case-management software program called PROMIS from a small company called Inslaw. Each country modified it to include a hidden backdoor, and through their sales agent Robert Maxwell, father of Ghislaine Maxwell, began distributing it to intelligence agencies, foreign governments and financial institutions around the world. Australia was one of these countries. The backdoor allowed American intelligence to monitor anyone using the software without their knowledge. Prosecutors, judges, banks, foreign spy agencies - all of them unknowingly handing over their data to a hidden observer. Governments that bought it to track criminals were themselves being tracked. The principle was simple and devastating: own the software that processes everyone’s data, and you own the data itself.

That principle did not die with PROMIS but instead became the foundational logic of the modern surveillance architecture. Every iteration since has been a more sophisticated version of the same idea.

Which brings us to Palantir. Founded with seed funding from the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel, Palantir is a data analytics company whose software is used by intelligence agencies, military organisations, police forces and governments around the world to aggregate, analyse and act on vast quantities of personal data. It is, in its essential architecture, PROMIS for the twenty-first century.

Coles supermarkets recently announced a partnership with Palantir. An American company founded with CIA money, whose software is used by intelligence services globally, now has access to the purchasing data of millions of ordinary Australians. What you buy, when you buy it and where you are when you do. All your personal information aggregated, analysed and retained. But why?

Most people heard this news and thought about supply chain management. Having spent a week reading Webb, I thought about something else entirely.

As one ABC analysis puts it, “By placing Palantir at the heart of its operations, Coles quietly smuggles in several key assumptions: that food is a commodity to be optimised, that paying for labour is a risk rather than a responsibility, and that data can capture everything of importance.”

My face is on a list somewhere. Yours probably is too.

The billionaires building bunkers in New Zealand are not irrational, they understand something about the sustainability of the current arrangement that most of us are only beginning to grasp. They also understand that networks which operated in darkness for nearly a century, are now carrying out some of their worst operations under more public scrutiny than they have ever faced before. The bunker building shows they know public sentiment is turning against them.

The genocide in Gaza is happening on everyone’s phone. The antisemitism deflection that protected the core power structures of these networks for seventy years, is visibly failing with an entire generation. The Epstein files exist and outgoing Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie has signalled his intention to read them aloud before completing his term. He has already released three new names. The ICJ has issued preliminary findings acknowledging the plausibility of South Africa’s genocide case against Israel over Gaza, as eighteen countries have now joined the case, with Cuba recently filing. This is something that would have been politically unthinkable a decade ago.

The people at the centre of this architecture understand, better than anyone, what happens once enough ordinary people begin understanding it too.

Here is what I want to leave you with.

History is not a fixed monument, it is a living narrative about what actually happened, who it served and what it means for now. The version of history we were given - of triumphant postwar democracy, of a free press which held power to account, of intelligence services protecting us, of Israel as a nation born of Holocaust survival and democratic ideals - that version was constructed. It’s not entirely false, but it is constructed to serve specific interests, with specific parts left out, and to function via institutional mechanisms which were designed to suppress the fuller picture right from the start.

Webb has connected enough of the people, institutions, places and crimes to genuinely call the official version of history misleading at best, an outright lie at worst. She’s shown us why we must continue questioning the official account of what we are told by those who lead us, especially when our sovereignty is on the line.

Avi Shlaim said he constantly reassesses his views in the light of evidence. That practice, uncomfortable, destabilising but necessary, is what this moment demands of all of us.

The rich are building bunkers because they know what the evidence shows.

Now you do too.

Whitney Webb’s One Nation Under Blackmail, Volume One, is available through Trine Day publishers and via her independent media platform Unlimited Hangout. The research is exhaustively sourced and I recommend it to anyone serious about understanding how we got here.

I understand why the nostalgia works because I grew up in the 80s and came of age in the 90s. I’m the first to admit that parts of the Australia we’re being told we need to get back to absolutely did feel more connected and more grounded than the country many people are experiencing now.

I remember the street parties where our entire road would close so we could celebrate Christmas together. Neighbours would come outside to share food and drinks, while one of the men always dressed up as Santa to hand out presents to us kids. We’d run back to our parents delighted, clutching new cricket bats, teddy bears or dolls. Barn dances at local community centres brought people together from all over the suburb. We’d dress up in our ‘country clothes’ for nights of music and hilariously terrible dancing, the steps of which we’d practice at school for weeks prior. Local festivals, absent of the branding and marketing we now expect, actually felt local. Live music was everywhere. We knew our neighbours.

There was a genuine sense of local community that existed among us before apps like Facebook arrived, bringing with them the disconnection which most of us now feel.

There are truths inside that nostalgia.

They’re just not the whole truth.

The reality is that the Australia many politicians are asking us to long for was an Australia where large sections of society were conveniently edited out of the narrative altogether.

The current populist story which longs for a simpler past tends to collapse three very different decades into one warm sepia blur. Yet the 70s, 80s and 90s were not united by wholesomeness, fairness or harmony. What they shared was a rigid social hierarchy that delivered the greatest comfort and stability to white, heterosexual men with secure employment.

For everyone else, belonging often came with conditions. So let’s take an honest look at what the past actually looked like for the people who lived through it.

The 1970s: Stable for some. Suffocating for others.

To be fair to those who feel a sense of longing and nostalgia for the 1970s, some aspects of those memories are rooted in lived reality. Manufacturing jobs were still fairly stable and easy to come by, unions carried genuine power for advocating on behalf of their workers, and owning a home was achievable for many working class families on a single income. The welfare state had expanded under Whitlam and there was a general consensus that ordinary Australians could build stable, fulfilled lives without the need to be wealthy. Compared to the economically stressed version of Australia many of us are experiencing today, it’s not too difficult to understand why some look back at the 70s fondly.

However, beneath the nostalgia, the 1970s were also a decade marked by growing social upheaval, economic instability, stagflation, anti-war protests and increasing resistance to the rigid cultural norms shaping post-war Australian society1. What the idyllic descriptions of the decade conveniently omit is that much of its apparent stability remained anchored to a social hierarchy which was only just beginning to be seriously challenged.

For women, many of the rights which we now take for granted either didn’t exist or were only just starting to emerge. Equal pay rulings had technically arrived by the early 70s, though on the whole, women continued to be paid substantially less than men for comparable work. Domestic violence was largely treated as a private family matter and marital rape remained legal for almost the entire decade. Given our current domestic violence crisis, I’m not honestly sure Australia has moved on from parts of that mindset as much as we like to think we have. For me, the fact that marital rape was still legal in living memory says a great deal about the foundations this country built its understanding of gender and power upon.

Children occupied a similarly voiceless position. Corporal punishment in schools was completely legal in most States. The cane, the ruler and the strap were part of everyday Australian childhood, rather than being shocking exceptions. Today, striking children in the way many adults routinely did in the 1970s would quite rightly lead to criminal charges. Yet only a few decades ago, adults beating children was considered normal discipline, and teachers were not only permitted to do the same, but were often supported by parents in doing so.

As a teacher, this is honestly something I still struggle to fully comprehend. We now work within safeguarding frameworks where even physically comforting a distressed child often requires permission, visibility and careful professional boundaries. The contrast between that reality and one where adults were legally and socially permitted to hit children in classrooms is mind blowing.

There is a reason so many Gen X Australians joke that nothing phases us after surviving childhood in the 70s and 80s. Humour has become one of the ways in which many people process the reality that violence at the hands of trusted adults was treated as an ordinary part of growing up.

At the same time, many of the institutions later exposed through the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse were operating openly throughout the decade. Churches, orphanages, reformatories and the machinery surrounding the Stolen Generations were not relics of some distant colonial past. They were contemporary Australian institutions operating in plain sight, within a society that consistently trusted authority figures more than the children they harmed.

For First Peoples Australians, the 1970s sat far closer to the era of forced assimilation than many people now seem willing to acknowledge. This was a period in which Aboriginal people were expected to abandon language, culture, family structures and connection to Country in order to fit into white Australian society. The 1967 referendum had only just passed, meaning Aboriginal Australians had only recently begun being counted in the census and recognised within federal lawmaking. The Racial Discrimination Act would not arrive until 1975 and land rights movements were still in their infancy.

Even moments now recognised as historic breakthroughs, such as Gough Whitlam pouring sand into Vincent Lingiari’s hand at Wave Hill in 1975, were deeply contested at the time. The Wave Hill walk-off itself began nearly a decade earlier, because Gurindji workers and families were living in appalling conditions while being paid dramatically less than white stockmen while tending land that had originally been theirs.

Yet many Australians didn’t view land rights as a justice issue at all. Conservative political voices, powerful industry groups and large sections of the media framed it instead as a threat to property ownership, mining interests and an economic model largely designed to advantage white Australian men. It’s a pattern that has become uncomfortably familiar whenever this country is forced to confront questions of fairness, equality and human rights.

Arguably, that dynamic has never truly disappeared. Australia has simply become more sophisticated in the way the law is used to delay, contain or override the claims of First Peoples nations when they come into conflict with political or economic interests.

Meanwhile, migrant communities were navigating an Australia still shaped by the deeply racist White Australia Policy, which remained in place until 1973. Southern European migrants often faced open hostility, discrimination and exploitation, though the experience of Asian migrants and refugees carried another layer entirely.

It is impossible to separate Australian attitudes towards Southeast Asian communities in the 1970s from the shadow of World War II, the Pacific campaigns, the Korean War and later Vietnam. By the time Vietnamese refugees began arriving after 1975, many Australians had already spent decades absorbing racialised fears connected to war in Asia. Southeast Asian migrants entered a country where large sections of the population had been conditioned to view Asian people, not simply as outsiders, but as a threat to Australian identity itself.

Vietnamese refugees encountered hostility2 that feels disturbingly familiar today, and the language around “boat people” was already embedded in Australian political culture long before Pauline Hanson and One Nation would later build an entire political movement around those same fears.

For LGBTQI+ Australians, the 1970s were far from a time of freedom or easy belonging. They were a decade where oppression was both legal and socially acceptable. Homosexuality remained criminalised across most of the country, and being openly gay could result in arrest, cost people their safety, careers, families and even their lives. Many Australians spent years hiding who they were because the consequences of being ‘outed’ could be devastating.

Police harassment was widespread, media portrayals were often openly hostile and transgender Australians existed almost entirely in the shadows of mainstream life.

Australia would entered the 1980s talking far more openly about equality and rights. Whether those rights were meaningfully protected or enforced, however, was another question entirely.

The 1980s: Progress arrived. So did the resistance.

The 1980s ushered in some fairly significant legal reforms for women, First Peoples and LGBTQI+ Australians. However, the gap between formal legal progress and the lived reality of these communities remained enormous. Beneath it all, backlash from many white Australian men towards these changes was already beginning to harden.

Economically, the country was also being radically reshaped under Hawke and Keating. Financial deregulation, privatisation and the slow-but-steady dismantling of Australia’s manufacturing base were fundamentally altering the social contract many working-class Australian families had taken for granted. The stable industrial economy that had helped create Australia’s sense of post-war prosperity was beginning to slip out of reach.

While for some Australians these reforms created genuine opportunity and prosperity, for many working-class communities, the experience was deeply unsettling. Industries which entire communities had built their identities around - manufacturing, steelworks, car production and textile factories - began shrinking or disappearing altogether. Communities built around stable industrial work began to fracture, leaving many working-class Australians feeling far less certain about the future than their parents ever had.

Importantly, much of the frustration and anxiety created by these societal changes was not directed towards the political and economic systems driving them. Instead, that resentment was increasingly redirected towards migrants, First Peoples, women and LGBTQI+ Australians who were simultaneously becoming more visible and pushing for greater equality within Australian society.

My own family arrived in Australia in 1983 as migrants fleeing the oppressive and violent Mugabe regime of post-war Zimbabwe. While we are white, that was largely where the privilege ended. I grew up inside a culture that often felt wildly different from the one I experienced at home, navigating the strange tension of being accepted as Australian in some ways, while still feeling like a cultural outsider in others.

Primary school during the 1980s often felt like a social minefield. My accent, still tinged with Afrikaans words like yaow instead of yeah and braai instead of BBQ, was mocked openly. I was bullied and quickly became aware that belonging in Australia often came with conditions attached. There was very little curiosity about difference, only the sense that anything outside the dominant culture needed correcting. I had a constant sense that to fit in, I somehow needed to become ‘extra Australian’, though I never quite figured out how to actually achieve this.

My dad experienced this shift very directly. In Rhodesia, he had occupied a high social position as a white man. Arriving in Australia as a migrant immediately placed him much lower in the social hierarchy.

In the very white bayside suburb where we settled during the 1980s, many of the fathers around us wore suits to professional jobs while my dad worked factory jobs from the moment he arrived and still works at what he now calls ‘the shithole’ today. Rather than complaining, he simply got on with rebuilding our lives, although looking back now, I can see what migration so often demands of people: the quiet surrender of status, identity and familiarity in exchange for physical safety, while never fully feeling like you belong in your new country.

Meanwhile, mum carried much of the invisible labour that kept our family afloat. She took in ironing to make extra money, worked reception jobs and did whatever else was necessary to help us survive financially. To his credit, dad always pulled far more domestic weight than many men of that era. Even so, the pressure of trying to rebuild a life from the bottom up still shaped our household profoundly.

As a young child, I did not fully understand what being poor meant. Though it became increasingly obvious that our family was not like many of the others in the comfortably middle-class community I was growing up in.

At the same time, multiculturalism was becoming official government policy, though resentment towards Asian immigration remained a live political force which simmered beneath the surface of Australian society. Racial violence targeting Vietnamese and Chinese communities was documented throughout the decade and often poorly policed or publicly minimised.

The Australia I have known has never fully matched the national mythology of fairness and equality we so often tell ourselves. Instead, it has often felt like a country with a quiet litmus test for belonging attached to it, one where acceptance is conditional on performing a very particular version of Australianness.

The pressure to conform did not stop at migration or cultural identity either. Expectations around gender, work and family life remained deeply rigid throughout much of the decade, even as Australia was beginning to speak more openly about equality.

For women, progress on equal rights was uneven. The Sex Discrimination Act was only passed in 1984 after fierce opposition from conservative politicians, business groups and many male public figures who framed even basic workplace protections for women as a threat to traditional Australian society. It is worth remembering just how male Australian political power still was at this point. Susan Ryan, who introduced the legislation, one of just 19 women in a parliament of 189 members and senators.

Workplace discrimination on the basis of sex was not even made formally illegal until the middle of the decade. Sexual harassment as a legal concept was still new, poorly understood and routinely dismissed by employers, institutions and courts.

In many industries, particularly male-dominated ones, workplace culture remained aggressively hierarchical and built around a very particular version of masculinity - one where humiliation, intimidation and emotional abuse were often treated as normal. Younger men were routinely hazed, bullied and expected to ‘toughen up’, while men perceived as homosexual, weak or effeminate were often subjected to intimidation, humiliation and at times physical or sexual violence.

For women entering these environments, the experience was often even more hostile and traumatic. Sexual harassment, intimidation and bullying by senior male figures were regularly treated as normal workplace behaviour rather than abuse. Even after the legislation changed, many women still had little meaningful protection when challenging men or institutions with far more power than they had.

Similarly, expectations at home barely shifted. Even as more women entered higher education or joined the workforce, they continued carrying the overwhelming majority of unpaid domestic labour, childcare and emotional care work at home. Sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild explored this double burden in her 1989 book The Second Shift, observing that while many women were embracing new forms of economic and social independence, large numbers of men still expected traditional domestic arrangements to remain the same3. In practice, many women were effectively working two jobs: one paid, one unpaid.

Meanwhile, marital rape was gradually criminalised across much of Australia during the 1980s. New South Wales and Victoria passed laws earlier in the decade, while Queensland would not criminalise it until 1989 and the Northern Territory until 1994. Despite the legal progress, prosecutions remained extraordinarily rare and public attitudes were often deeply hostile towards victims. Once again, the law was beginning to move faster than the male-dominated institutions and culture responsible for enforcing it.

Children were not faring much better, despite the creation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989. The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, one of the largest public inquiries in Australian history, later documented that abuse within churches and religious institutions, schools, orphanages and youth organisations was widespread throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and that maintaining a facade respectability was routinely prioritised over the safety of children they were supposed to protect.

On the rare occasions perpetrators were reported, they were often quietly relocated rather than prosecuted. Survivors of child abuse were routinely silenced while offenders remained free to abuse elsewhere.

At the same time, vulnerable young people were increasingly criminalised rather than supported. Street kids and runaway teenagers were often treated as social problems to be removed from public view rather than seen as children experiencing crisis. Serious policy responses to child abuse were finally beginning to emerge, though they remained underfunded, inconsistent and politically contested.

For our First Peoples, the decade brought greater visibility alongside continuing systemic violence. The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody began in 1987 and documented what can only be described as catastrophic institutional failures across policing, prisons and the justice system. Its 339 recommendations would later become one of the clearest roadmaps for reform Australia has ever produced. Despite this, almost every single recommendation made by the Commission remains unimplemented today.

At the same time, the reality of the Stolen Generations was still a gaping wound. For decades, First Peoples children had been forcibly removed from their families by governments, churches and welfare authorities under assimilation policies designed to absorb them into white Australian society. Language, culture, identity and connection to Country were deliberately stripped away from many of these children, often causing trauma that lasted across entire lifetimes.

It is difficult to overstate how catastrophic this was for Aboriginal communities. Many children never fully recovered from the experience of removal, and recent truth-telling through the Yoorrook Justice Commission has again exposed the profound intergenerational trauma these policies continue to create today.

What unsettles me looking back is how normalised anti-Aboriginal racism still felt during my own childhood at the tail end of these policies. I can still remember children casually using slurs like ‘abbo’ and ‘bung’, alongside jokes about dead Aboriginal people, in the schoolyard. I remember feeling deeply uncomfortable with it, though also awkwardly laughing along because I had no idea how to push back against something that seemed so normalised within my quite homogenous, middle-class community, where there was not a First Peoples Australian to be found.

Land rights legislation began advancing in some parts of the country, though fierce resistance came from many of the same sections of Australia that continued holding most of the political, economic and cultural power. The Queensland government under Joh Bjelke-Petersen was openly hostile towards Indigenous activism and protest movements, while police violence against Aboriginal communities often occurred without any meaningful accountability. Life expectancy gaps, incarceration rates and poverty remained extreme, despite the growing national language around reconciliation and equality.

Even symbolic acts of recognition remained deeply controversial. The return of Uluru to the Anangu people in 1985 was celebrated by many Australians as an overdue act of justice, though others still viewed Aboriginal land ownership through the lens of old frontier politics. Influential anti-land rights activists such as Peter Severin, the man responsible for installing the controversial chain-rope used by tourists to climb Uluru, helped fund and organise resistance to the movement across parts of the Northern Territory and pastoral sector4.

At the same time, figures such as former policeman and self-styled outback historian William (Bill) McKinnon continued to be publicly celebrated as embodiments of the ‘fair dinkum Aussie’, despite long-standing allegations surrounding the killing of Aboriginal man Yukkanannu decades earlier. Men like McKinnon often dismissed calls for land rights or reparations altogether, reflecting a broader Australian unwillingness to seriously confront the violence and dispossession underpinning settlement itself5.

For LGBTQI+ Australians, the 1980s was a decade of growing visibility with the inaugural Mardi Gras parade held in Sydney in 1978; however they were also years marked by fear, grief and profound social hostility. Homosexuality remained criminalised in Western Australia, Queensland and Tasmania throughout the decade, and workplace dismissal for being gay was still legal and routine across the country. Many people continued to live double lives, simply to survive socially and economically.

Then the AIDS crisis arrived in Australia.

From the early 1980s onwards, gay communities across the country were devastated by HIV/AIDS. As many leaders from politics, media and religious life responded with moral panic, stigma and outright cruelty, gay communities suffered such a great loss of life, health professionals compared it to a war. Gay men were frequently portrayed as threats to public morality itself, rather than understood as individuals experiencing a public health crisis. Families abandoned their sons. Friends watched entire social circles disappear within the space of a few years. Meanwhile, public discussion around AIDS often carried an unmistakable undertone of judgement, believing that the suffering was somehow deserved.

Once again, fear became politically useful.

Looking back on the 80s now, it is difficult not to recognise the early formation of the politics that would later fuel Pauline Hanson and One Nation in the 1990s. The resentment, the fear around immigration, the hostility towards multiculturalism and the idea that equality itself somehow threatened “ordinary Australians” did not suddenly emerge out of nowhere. The foundations were already there.

The 1990s: The backlash finds its voice

By the 1990s, the Australia many politicians now ask us to nostalgically return to was already disappearing. The old industrial economy had fractured, manufacturing was steadily being replaced by service industries and emerging tech sectors, inequality was widening and neoliberalism was reshaping Australian life under Paul Keating before accelerating further under John Howard. At the same time, the decade also produced some of the country’s most hopeful pushes towards a more inclusive Australia.

The 1992 Mabo decision formally recognised native title for the first time, overturning the legal fiction of terra nullius which had underpinned colonisation itself. The backlash was immediate. After the 1996 Wik decision found that native title could coexist with pastoral leases in some circumstances, the Howard government, strongly backed by Queensland and mining interests, moved quickly to weaken Indigenous land rights through its Ten Point Plan. This effectively reduced native title to an inconvenience which can be side-stepped in favour of economic interests.

For women, workplace discrimination and sexism were now formally illegal, though the lived reality often remained very different. Violence against women was finally beginning to be studied and measured more seriously, revealing what many women had always known: the violence had never been rare, only ignored. Meanwhile, women working within government and public institutions on gender equality policies increasingly became targets of ridicule and hostility from a growing conservative culture war.

The 1990s were also the decade of my first job. I worked at Franklins Fresh, a supermarket chain which no longer exists, where roles still felt heavily divided along gender lines. Women were mostly placed on check-outs or in the deli, while men dominated grocery, produce and fresh food. I joined the grocery team and was often the only young woman working on the floor.

The sexism of the era was rarely explicit enough to be called out formally, though it saturated the culture of the workplace itself. Sexual and racist jokes were constant, assumptions about ‘men’s work’ and ‘women’s work’ went largely unquestioned and the better jobs were quietly reserved for the boys. Often I was left facing and packing shelves or helping customers, while the guys disappeared out the back to load pallets, smoke, swear and talk about women.

What was likely still a common sight in male-dominated work environments, and something I recall vividly, were the posters of naked women hanging inside the grocery dock, something nobody ever thought to question or remove. It was not a workplace that felt overtly dangerous, though it absolutely reflected a culture where casual sexism remained deeply normalised.

For LGBTQI+ Australians, the devastation of the AIDS crisis continued into the early 1990s even as activism, visibility and legal reform slowly expanded. For this community, the decade became a painful reminder that visibility did not necessarily mean safety, acceptance or dignity in the eyes of broader Australian society.

The irony here is that the same culture that had treated gay men with suspicion and moral panic during the AIDS crisis was often still failing vulnerable children behind closed institutional doors.

Even though mandatory reporting laws and child safeguarding policies had existed in some states for decades, enforcement remained patchy outside of health and education while many institutions, including churches and religious organisations, continued prioritising their own reputation over the safety of children. Much of the abuse later exposed through the Royal Commission was still occurring throughout the decade.

I still remember an experience from primary school in the early 1990s that, looking back now, feels almost impossible to comprehend. A man brought in to direct our school play announced during a rehearsal one afternoon, that ‘for fun’ we were all going to practice ‘stage kissing’. Boys and girls were told to find a partner and then, while standing awkwardly in front of our teachers and deputy principal inside the school hall, we were instructed to kiss each other with open mouths but ‘no tongue’.

I remember most of my friends and I looking at one another with shy embarrassment and giggling. For many of us, this was our first experience of kissing, beyond a peck on the lips which some students who were ‘going out’ had cautiously allowed. None of this was necessary for the production itself. There were no kissing scenes in the play. At the time, however, none of the adults present appeared to view the situation as particularly inappropriate.

Years later, I would hear that the same man had been accused of sexually assaulting a male minor overseas.

I often think about that moment because it really brings into focus something deeply unsettling about how poorly many adults and institutions understood boundaries, safeguarding and child protection during that era. Behaviour that would immediately trigger serious intervention today could once occur openly in front of authority figures without anyone seriously questioning it.

At the same time, multiculturalism itself was becoming a political battleground. When Pauline Hanson gave her maiden speech to federal parliament in 1996, her message was not new, but delivering it in that chamber, on that occasion, was one of the most openly racist acts seen in federal politics in decades. The resentment towards migration, multiculturalism, land rights and anti-discrimination laws had already been building for years beneath the surface of Australian society. Hanson simply gave it a political voice at a moment when it could be broadcast to the entire nation on TV.

The 1990s were arguably the decade where Australia’s nostalgia politics fully crystallised. The country was changing rapidly, and rather than confronting the economic and social systems driving that anxiety, many Australians turned towards a mythologised version of the past, one where Anglo-Australian cultural dominance, rigid gender roles and social hierarchy still felt secure and unquestioned.

2026: We find ourselves here again

Sometimes, these days, I do find myself wondering if we are moving backwards. The arguments feel older and more played out than they should. The targets are depressingly familiar. The language of ‘taking the country back’ clangs with a particularly hollow exhaustion to it when you’ve spent any time looking honestly at what the Australia of the past was actually like.

Yet despite all the politically motivated yearning for the past, the world around us has fundamentally changed.

The Australia of the 1970s, 80s and even 90s existed within the final decades of the post-industrial age. Now, more than twenty-five years into the digital revolution, we are living through transformations that have altered how we work, communicate, form identity and understand the world around us. Children no longer build treehouses or roam the streets until dark. Teenagers barely look up from their phones. We are all, to varying degrees, permanently tethered to devices that give media organisations and political movements direct, uninterrupted access to our attention, twenty-four hours a day. It is worth pausing to notice that the very platforms delivering this fantasy of return are themselves products of the transformation that made the past feel so distant in the first place.

And yet the nostalgia merchants never seem to ask the obvious question: would the children growing up today actually have survived the Australia they’re being asked to long for? The casual violence in classrooms. The institutional silence around abuse. The complete absence of any legal framework recognising their rights or safety. The expectation that you simply suck-it-up and get on with it. We worried about very different things back then and not always because things were better. Often it was simply because the harm was invisible, unnamed and expected to stay that way.

The fantasy of return ignores what that simplicity depended upon. It depended upon the silencing of enormous sections of the population, highly conditional ideas of belonging, and deeply outdated ideas about gender, sexuality, race and children’s rights, and it depended upon refusing any serious recognition that this land is, and always will be, Aboriginal land.

No country can turn back time, thankfully. Though plenty of politicians will still try to win votes by convincing Australians that they can somehow restore a version of the past which never truly existed for large parts of the population in the first place.

For many Australians, the so-called ‘good old days’ were only good because somebody else was expected to quietly carry the cost of them.

In the sprawling regional NSW electorate of Farrer, which sits on the Murray River along Victoria’s northern border, a seat the Liberal and National parties had held without interruption for 77 years, One Nation won. It didn’t just sneak past the finish line either. Instead it won comfortably, with over 40 per cent of the primary vote and a 35-point swing in their favour. The Liberal Party, in a seat they had consistently held since 1949, came in at just 11 per cent.

Standing in the victory room, Barnaby Joyce, former leader of the Nationals, former Deputy Prime Minister, and a man who held real governmental power for years, mocked the Liberals over the result. “It’s like the Marijuana Party,” he said, grinning.

Just think about that for a moment.

Joyce led the Nationals for years and had every opportunity to deliver results for exactly the kinds of regional communities that just produced this result.

Yet under his leadership, regional communities continued losing services and opportunities, while water politics, mining interests and large agricultural lobbying groups increasingly shaped government priorities. Many of the same towns now voting for One Nation have spent years dealing with hospital shortages, rising costs, struggling local businesses and younger generations leaving in search of better opportunities in larger cities.

Meanwhile, the man who presided over all of this is now a senior figure in the party those communities just elected as their ‘anti-establishment’ voice.

Joyce didn’t just fail regional Australia. He rebranded himself, jumped ship to One Nation in December last year and is now busy leading the revolt against himself. That should tell you everything about how much of this is genuine and how much is opportunism wearing an Akubra.

Pauline Hanson, standing nearby, had a message for everyone else: “We’re coming after those other seats.”

She’s not bluffing.

Here’s the thing that almost nobody in our political and media class wants to say out loud, because it implicates all of them: this is not Pauline Hanson’s fault. This result was shaped over decades by political decisions made well before One Nation arrived to capitalise on them. They helped create the anger, One Nation just learned how to weaponise it.

Places like Farrer, where One Nation’s messaging is landing most successfully, are also the places where the local hospital has been quietly collapsing for decades, and where mental health services either don’t exist or have waiting lists measured in months. Places where young people leave because jobs are scarce, while the ones who choose to stay watch their cost of living steadily climb as their wages stagnate. Places where the river system has been mismanaged for decades by governments that prioritised irrigators with the right connections, over local farmers and towns trying to survive. Places where the NBN is still a joke and the mobile coverage drops out on the highway.

These communities didn’t just wake up one day and decide to vote for a party with a thirty-year track record of chaos and contradictions. They arrived here after decades of being promised one thing at election time, only to watch governments head back to Canberra and do another.

The Nationals should look at the Farrer result and feel a deep sense of shame. This was their heartland. Rural and regional Australia is what they exist to represent and they got just nine per cent of the primary vote. A swing against them this big is not a protest, it’s a verdict.

Now here’s where things become truly uncomfortable, because One Nation is not going to fix any of this. The evidence for that is not a matter of opinion, it’s in the public record. Pauline Hanson has consistently voted against increasing funding for public schools. She voted against measures which would ease housing affordability. She opposed legislation to prevent price-gouging by Coles and Woolies. She has consistently supported cuts to welfare and support services. She is campaigning on cutting $90 billion in government spending, slashing the NDIS and intends to pull Australia out of the United Nations and the World Health Organization.

The people who just voted for her in Farrer, people genuinely struggling and reliant on functioning public services, are backing a party that has consistently voted against many of the things that would materially improve their lives.

That’s the brutal irony sitting at the centre of this moment.

What is most frustrating is that pointing any of this out doesn’t work and it hasn’t worked for the past thirty years either. Every election cycle, One Nation’s prior voting record is published, the contradictions are patiently explained and someone does the fact-check. Yet the votes keep coming, mostly because the people casting those votes are not stupid, they’re fed-up and they’re furious. I think we can all relate to the fact that when you’re furious at a system that has let you down, being handed a fact sheet by someone who is part of that system doesn’t change your mind. Instead it tends to confirm our suspicions that they still just don’t get it.

So how did we actually arrive at this point as a nation?

Labor has spent the past two decades steadily moving away from its working-class base, chasing professional urban voters, repositioning and triangulating until it became a party more comfortable talking about symbolic and cultural politics than wages and job security. There are good reasons some of those shifts happened, but the cost for this is real and has resulted in a huge chunk of Labor’s traditional constituency now left looking for someone else who seems to give a damn about them.

The Nationals took regional Australia for granted for so long it became institutional. While Joyce was co-governing in Canberra, regional hospitals closed, schools deteriorated and water was allocated in ways that had devastating consequences for many farming communities. Alongside all of this came years of scandals, political chaos and drunken buffoonery that increasingly left many voters wondering what the hell the Nationals were actually doing for regional Australia.

And then there’s the Liberal Party, which deserves its own reckoning, because what we’re watching is not just a party that lost an election. It’s a party in genuine ideological freefall. The Liberal Party used to stand for something you could argue with: small business, individual liberty, cautious institutional conservatism, economic management. It had a legible philosophy even if you disagreed with it.

What exactly does it stand for now? The Voice referendum saw significant parts of the party lean into racially coded dog-whistling rather than making a principled constitutional argument around reconciliation. The response to the Gaza conflict produced some of the most embarrassing performative posturing seen in any recent Western parliament, driven less by coherent foreign policy than by factional signaling to pro-Israel donor and community interests, with little regard for the cost to Australia’s international standing or to the impact this has had on Australian Arab and Muslim communities. Since the 2025 election loss, the party’s internal leadership instability has revealed an organisation so consumed by factional warfare it can barely sustain a coherent public position for more than a few weeks at a time.

Instead of taking a good, hard look at how and why they have lost touch with ordinary voters, and recalibrating accordingly, the Coalition is now preferencing One Nation in seats across the country. Apparently they’ve decided that feeding the country to the crocodile is better than being eaten themselves. Every time they do this, they signal to conservative voters that One Nation is a legitimate political destination, which is precisely the last message a party trying to survive should be sending. They are accelerating their own irrelevance while pretending it’s strategy.

A healthy democracy needs a credible centre-right party, not just as competition for Labor, but as a check on exactly the kind of authoritarian populism One Nation represents. When that institution hollows itself out, the damage doesn’t just effect the Liberal Party, it ripples through the whole architecture of Australian democratic politics.

One Nation didn’t create this vacuum, it walked into one that had been forming for decades. But there’s another part of this story that barely gets discussed, and it might be the most important part of all. How are ordinary Australians supposed to see any of this clearly when the information environment they’re navigating has been deliberately designed to prevent them from doing so?

Let’s be direct about the role played by the Australian media landscape, because it’s genuinely unusual by international standards in ways most Australians don’t fully register.

News Corp controls somewhere between 60 and 70 per cent of print and online news readership in this country. That is an extraordinary concentration of editorial power in the hands of a single organisation, which has documented ideological commitments and direct relationships with the political right. Sky News After Dark spent years spitting out content that would have been considered fringe conspiracy material a decade ago and predictably, that content didn’t stay on Sky. It got clipped, shared and distributed through Facebook to audiences who had no idea they were watching something that had been rejected by the standards of mainstream journalism.

The pipeline from Sky to Facebook to your uncle’s feed is real, it’s deliberate and it works.

The Facebook dimension for older voters is almost entirely missing from the public conversation about misinformation, which tends to fixate on TikTok and younger people. However the research consistently shows that older Facebook users, particularly those who came to social media later and without the embedded scepticism that comes from growing up with it, are significantly more susceptible to misinformation, more likely to share it, and less likely to fact check what they are being told.

Crucially, the content being served to them is not random but is precision-targeted by algorithms that know exactly which emotional triggers keep different groups of people engaged. Fear. Cultural threat. Nostalgia. Disgust. These are not accidents of the feed, they are the direct intention of it.

What makes this all particularly cruel and difficult to navigate for older Australians is that many of them came of age in an era when the newspaper and the six o’clock news operated under at least some professional and ethical norms around accuracy and truth. For much of their lives, the information they were consuming from mainstream media outlets was, at least broadly speaking, reliable. That confidence has now been hijacked by a completely different information environment, one that shares none of those standards and offers no equivalent accountability.

When something appears in your Facebook feed with a professional-looking graphic and confident language, the brain that learned to trust the Herald, the Age or the ABC doesn’t automatically recognise it as operating by completely different standards of truth and accountability. While it might be a convenient lens for many of us to view this through, that’s not stupidity. It’s the collision between older instincts about trust, and a media environment which has been built to exploit them.

Then there’s political advertising itself, which quite frankly, should be a national scandal. Australia is one of the very few comparable democracies with no meaningful truth-in-political-advertising laws governing our Federal elections. South Australia has a law compelling truthful advertising, so does the ACT. The Commonwealth, however, does not.

Political parties are explicitly exempt from the consumer protection laws that would prevent a business from making false claims about a product. You can be prosecuted for lying in a car advertisement. You cannot be prosecuted for lying on a how-to-vote card.

This is not an oversight, but a deliberate political choice made by people who benefit from the system staying exactly as it is. Consumer protection laws exist because we decided, as a society, that it is not acceptable to lie to people in order to take their money. Yet somehow, we seem comfortable allowing both political parties and the media ecosystems surrounding them, to lie to people in order to manipulate and take their vote. Until that changes, the people with the most sophisticated lying apparatus will keep winning.

One Nation’s primary vote is now polling at over twenty per cent nationally. Gina Rinehart, Australia’s wealthiest person, a mining billionaire with a long history of opposing stronger worker protections and wages, has provided substantial financial and material support to the party, while Hanson neglected to declare a private jet flight between Melbourne and Sydney and who knows what else.

The party of the battler is being bankrolled by a billionaire.

Meanwhile, Barnaby Joyce, the former Nationals leader who spent years helping shape the very conditions driving this anger, stood in the victory room mocking the Coalition for losing the trust of regional voters, as though he had played no role in the party’s collapse. The staggering hypocrisy of now positioning himself as part of the solution, rather than one of the architects of the problem, should force us to seriously ask whether this is the kind of political leadership the country actually wants.

Unfortunately, this could all get significantly worse before it gets better. However, the way it gets better is not by treating the people who voted for One Nation as the problem rather than the symptom.

The real problem is thirty years of political neglect dressed up as governance, a media ecosystem that profits from confusion and outrage, political advertising laws with no teeth and a system filled with elected leaders who have become so comfortable with their own self-interest that they’ve forgotten what they were actually voted in for.

The work of rebuilding is unglamorous, slow and most importantly, needs to be anchored locally. Our politicians need to begin rebuilding faith in democratic institutions, faith that has been eroded over decades, one community at a time. It means parties delivering visible, material improvements in people’s lives rather than endlessly announcing programs and initiatives that lead nowhere. It means a federal truth in political advertising law with genuine oversight and enforcement. It means serious media ownership reform and a royal commission into media concentration in this country.

Most of all, it means the political class doing something it is genuinely terrible at: sitting down, shutting up and listening to the Australians they’re elected to represent, rather than to the special interests that currently dominate the public narrative.

Most of this doesn’t make for great television. It is also unlikely to generate viral moments on social media.

However, genuine and purposeful engagement with local communities is the only thing that has ever actually worked. If the parties most alarmed by One Nation’s rise cannot find either the humility or the political courage to start rebuilding trust slowly, visibly and locally, they should stop acting surprised by results like the one in Farrer.

Because when people lose faith that democratic institutions can improve their lives, we can now see exactly where that road leads.

Anzac Day has only recently expanded to acknowledge all those who have served, regardless of where, but that change is easy to miss. No real effort is made to find or honour migrants who carry service records from other countries, other wars, other flags, especially if, like Dad’s, that service was not for an allied force. His service exists somewhere in that gap: technically included, practically invisible.

Let’s be fair, it’s understandable. Anzac Day exists to commemorate those who fought and lost their lives in service of Australia. Yet it hasn’t always done that either. As I’ve learned more about its history, I’ve discovered that First Peoples veterans were excluded from Anzac commemoration for most of the holiday’s existence, men and women who served this country, written out of its memory. The pattern of who we choose to remember, and who we quietly leave out, runs deeper than most of us realise.

After the defeated Rhodesian government transferred power to Robert Mugabe in April 1980, the country was renamed Zimbabwe. Mugabe’s early pledges of reconciliation and multiracial nation-building gave many genuine reason for hope. “If yesterday I fought against you,” he said famously, “today you have become a friend.” For a brief moment, people believed him.

It didn’t take long for my parents, still in their mid-twenties and raising two daughters under three, to realise they were wrong. Instead of seeing things improve, they watched as their country became increasingly unstable. Reports of political violence grew. Racial tensions sharpened into brutal ethnic violence, as Mugabe's forces turned on the Ndebele people in the country's south. Economic policies aimed at white Zimbabweans became increasingly punitive. Mugabe, who had spoken of friendship, now referred to them openly as "the enemy”. Eventually, they had to ask themselves the question so many families ask in frightened times: is there still a future for us here?

The answer was no. My parents began the process of migrating to Australia.

For Dad, leaving meant losing his citizenship immediately, with no right of return. He had been born in Rhodesia, fought for it, lost friends in it. Fighting a bush war means knowing the land intimately: every ridge, every river crossing, every place where something happened that you can never unknow. It was the only place that had ever truly felt like his. Then it was gone.

That kind of displacement doesn’t stay with one person. It travels. I was too young to understand what we were leaving behind, but the leaving has shaped everything since. I have never truly lived on land I belong to.

I want to be careful here, because the comparison I’m about to draw has limits I need to name. My family’s experience of displacement is not the same as what Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have endured, starting with the fact that even though our choices were desperate, they were still choices. The scale is different. The deliberateness is different. The duration is different. The ongoing nature of it is different.

What happened to First Peoples Australians after colonisation was not a political rupture or a migration crisis. It has been a systematic, government-sanctioned destruction of peoples, cultures, languages and land enacted by successive governments for more than two hundred years, and it continues to this day.

What displacement teaches us, if we let it, is empathy. Not the performative kind, the kind that lives in the body. The kind that recognises a wound in others without needing it explained. So when I watch First Peoples Elders and veterans in Perth, Sydney and Melbourne booed as they Welcome us to, or Acknowledge, the Country we are standing on during Anzac Day dawn services, at the Shrine of Remembrance, on my own Country, I feel what I can only describe as grief-rage. The kind of anger that has nowhere to go but through you.

What disgusts me almost as much is watching certain politicians seize the moment to take cheap shots at those ceremonies instead of standing firmly behind them. Rather than clearly condemning the disrespect shown to First Peoples veterans and Elders, they start talking about Welcomes to Country being “overused” or “losing meaning.” They dress the hostility up as cultural fatigue, pretend it’s about ceremony, then cash in on the division it creates.

For readers outside Australia and New Zealand, some context. Anzac Day is not a public holiday in the way that phrase usually implies, a day off, loosely observed. It is the closest thing both countries have to sacred civic ground. It marks the anniversary of the first major military campaign fought by Australian and New Zealand forces in the First World War: the landing at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915, a campaign of catastrophic losses that somehow forged a national identity out of tragedy. Over a century later, hundreds of thousands of Australians rise before dawn every April 25th to stand in the dark and be quiet together. It is, in its own secular way, a form of prayer.

Which is why what happened this year was so striking, not just in its cruelty, but in its choreography.

The disruptions were not spontaneous. In the days before the services, far-right anti-immigration group Fight for Australia used social media to coordinate attendance at multiple dawn services with the explicit aim of disrupting Welcome to Country ceremonies. Three cities. One morning. All planned.

In Perth, at Kings Park, a memorial site overlooking the Swan River where Western Australians have gathered to remember their dead since the First World War, Whadjuk and Yued Noongar Elder Aunty Di Ryder stepped up to deliver the Welcome to Country.

Aunty Di is not only an Elder, she is a Staff Sergeant who served in the Australian Regular Army for over twenty years, across three corps, retiring in 1995. She has spent the decades since as President of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Veterans and Services Association of WA, fighting to ensure Indigenous veterans receive the recognition and entitlements they were historically denied. She is a Medal of the Order of Australia recipient. Aunty Di is, by any measure, precisely the kind of person an Anzac Day service exists to honour.

The booing began the moment she said “welcome to Noongar Country.” It grew louder as she described her own military service.

In Melbourne, at the Shrine of Remembrance, built with the donations of ordinary Australians to honour the 114,000 Victorians who served in the First World War, Bunurong and Gunditjmara Elder Uncle Mark Brown rose to deliver his Welcome to Country before a crowd of more than fifty thousand people.

The Bunurong are the Traditional Owners of the land on which Melbourne stands. The Gunditjmara, from southwest Victoria, are among the world’s oldest known engineers. Their aquaculture system at Budj Bim, built over six thousand years ago, is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. Uncle Mark has delivered the Welcome to Country at the Shrine before. He was booed there last year too. He continued anyway. This year, the crowd drowned out the disruption with applause.

In Sydney, at the Cenotaph in Martin Place, Pastor and Uncle Ray Minniecon delivered the Acknowledgement of Country. Uncle Ray is a Kabi-Kabi and Gurang-Gurang man from southeast Queensland, and a South Sea Islander, descended from the people of Ambrym Island in Vanuatu, whose ancestors were brought to Australia as forced labour.

Uncle Ray served with the 51st Battalion, Royal Queensland Regiment. His grandfather, Private James Lingwoodock, served with the 11th Light Horse Brigade in the First World War. In 2006, Uncle Ray co-founded the Coloured Digger Project specifically to recover the erased histories of Indigenous veterans. He has spent his life making sure the military contribution of First Peoples is not forgotten.

He was booed for over a minute. A 24-year-old man was arrested for making a public nuisance.

Services in other cities including Canberra, Brisbane and Adelaide passed without disruption. Nobody has fully explained why those three cities and not others. That question is worth sitting with.

Afterwards, Uncle Ray described the booing as “water off a duck’s back,” the kind of composure that comes not from indifference, but from a lifetime of watching this country dress its cruelty up as principle.

Now imagine something for a moment.

You arrive at a friend’s place in say, St Kilda for a memorial wake. People have come from all over: some live nearby, some have travelled across the city, a few have come from interstate or overseas. Once everyone arrives, your friend stands up and says, “Welcome to our place here in St Kilda. Glad you could make it.”

Suddenly, a group of people starts booing.

Confused, you ask what their problem is.

“We all live in St Kilda too,” they say. “Who are you to welcome us to our own suburb?”

It sounds ridiculous because it is ridiculous. A welcome is not a declaration of ownership. It is an act of hospitality, a recognition that people have gathered in a place, and that someone from that place is extending respect, care and acknowledgment to those arriving there.

Or try this. Every April 25th, at Anzac Day commemorations across New Zealand, the Haka is performed. It is a moment of profound respect for the fallen, and nobody boos it. People literally weep while watching it. They film it on their phones and send it to people they love. The Haka is a First Peoples ceremony, ancient, spiritual, specific to the Maori people who carry it. So is Welcome to Country. The difference is not what they are. The difference is whose Country we are standing on when they happen and how much we have invested in not acknowledging it.

I visited the Auckland War Memorial Museum recently. There are entire rooms dedicated to the wars fought between Maori and the colonists, presented clearly and without euphemism, as part of the story of how New Zealand became New Zealand. Nobody has tried to remove them. Te Reo Maori is an official language. The Treaty of Waitangi sits at the foundation of the nation’s constitutional identity, however imperfectly honoured.

New Zealand is far from a finished project, and the same populist forces at work in Australia are busy trying to dismantle any progress there too. But there is significant pushback from the people of New Zealand, something made possible by a baseline acknowledgement of their colonial history that Australia has never quite managed to reach. We are still arguing about whether to acknowledge it at all.

Somehow, when it comes to Welcome to Country ceremonies in Australia, people deliberately pretend not to understand this distinction. They boo a Staff Sergeant for welcoming them to her Country. They jeer a man whose grandfather rode with the Light Horse Brigade for extending the same welcome, safe passage and hospitality as your friend at the party.

Before we go any further, let’s establish something foundational: most people who object loudest to Welcome to Country cannot accurately tell you what it is.

The word “Country” in this context is an Aboriginal concept with no real equivalent in English. It isn’t a reference to Australia the nation-state. It refers to the specific ancestral lands, waters, laws, languages, spiritual relationships and living identity of a particular First Peoples nation.

A Welcome to Country is a welcome to a specific place, from the people who have belonged to that place for tens of thousands of years. It is, in its most ancient form, a ceremony which happened when travellers from one Country entered another. Upon meeting one another, the hosts greeted their neighbours by saying: you are safe here, we vouch for you, treat this place well.

Only Traditional Owners, or people granted specific permission by Traditional Owners, can deliver one. It cannot be performed by just anyone. It is a cultural responsibility, not a bureaucratic formality.

As Ngunnawal Elder Jude Barlow has described it, being welcomed to Country means talking to the spiritual ancestors and saying: let this person come through. We trust they’re not going to do any harm on this Country, and so do not harm them.

The Elders are vouching for us. They are asking their ancestors to keep us safe. They are extending trust and protection to strangers, including strangers whose governments spent two hundred years trying to erase them.

I am a migrant, an outsider looking in, so I want to be careful not to speak for traditions I don’t fully understand. But I do find myself wondering what else might be happening at these ceremonies that we never stop to think about. When you stand on Country that has been sacred for tens of thousands of years, at a site already weighted with grief and memory and the names of the dead, while an Elder performs an ancient ceremony of welcome, something is happening that goes beyond what any of us can fully see.

Most people sense this instinctively, even if they can’t name it. There is a reason nobody boos the Haka. Our own Australian rugby team once failed to show it proper respect before a Bledisloe Cup match. The All Blacks gave us an absolute hiding. Nobody has made that mistake since.

Booing an ancient ceremony at a dawn service, of all places, strikes me as exactly the kind of thing a good friend of mine would call bad juju. Yet, these strangers were booing.

Here is something worth considering: why does nobody boo the Lord’s Prayer?

Every single sitting day of the Australian Federal Parliament opens with it. Our elected representatives begin each day not with a moment of silent reflection, not with a non-denominational acknowledgement of shared responsibility, but with the Lord’s Prayer. Specifically, they use the Protestant version, the one that ends with “for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever.” When this was introduced way back at Federation in 1901, the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne objected that it was “distinctly Protestant.” He was right then. It still is.

Every state parliament does the same thing. Most local councils across the country say it as well. The ACT Legislative Assembly is the only exception, having quietly replaced the prayer some years ago with an invitation for members to reflect on their responsibilities. This strikes me as both more democratic and more honest.

Now consider the fact that nearly forty percent of Australians identify as having no religion at all. That is almost half the country. The prayers used in our Houses of Parliament come from the Anglican Church, a denomination that makes up roughly thirteen percent of the population. For those keeping track, Anglicanism is a church that started in England in the 1530s so that Henry VIII could divorce his wife, after the Pope said no. The Vatican apparently had a problem with it then. They still do. Meanwhile, the cultural practices being booed at dawn services are tens of thousands of years old.

So the Lord’s Prayer represents just thirteen percent of us. A prayer in every parliament since Federation. Nobody is organising groups to boo it or is crying about it being overused.

Now consider Welcome to Country. An ancient cultural protocol performed by the custodians of this specific land. No one is asked to believe anything. No one is required to stand, pray or profess anything. Every single person present, regardless of their faith, background, politics or ancestry, is welcomed. The ceremony makes no demands. It offers only hospitality.

Yet it is Welcome to Country that is being called divisive.

I am not arguing that we should tear the Lord’s Prayer out of parliament just to even the score. What I am saying is that we have a serious consistency problem in this country. The practices that embed one minority religion in our most powerful democratic institutions pass without comment. A practice that asks us to acknowledge the oldest living culture on earth, on its own land, is treated as radical provocation.

That inconsistency is not accidental. It is a choice about whose culture counts as the default and whose counts as an imposition.

To understand why so many Australians hold such confused and hostile views about Welcome to Country, we need to look again at what happened during the 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum. If you’re reading this from outside Australia, here is the short version.

In 2023, the Australian government held a referendum asking whether the constitution should be changed to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and establish an advisory body, The Voice, through which First Peoples communities could advise parliament on policies affecting them. To say it was a modest proposal is putting it mildly. The Voice gave First Peoples no veto power and no ability to make law. Put simply, it would have meant First Peoples having a seat at the table in conversations about their own lives.

The Uluru Statement from the Heart, a document produced through years of genuine community consultation, asked for it.

Despite all of this, it was defeated when sixty percent of Australians voted No.

The No vote had more than one parent. Some Australians had genuine disagreements about the mechanism, how The Voice would work in practice, what its powers would be, how it would be accountable. Those concerns were real, even if they were misguided and often drowned out by louder, less honest voices.

Then there was the political calculation. Academic analysis published in the Australian Journal of Social Issues concluded that the then-Opposition leader's decision to oppose the referendum was driven not by principle but by a desire to survive as leader. Analyst Peter Brent also noted that, had he ordered the party room to campaign for Yes, he would likely have been removed. That is not a principled position. That is a numbers game, played with First Peoples recognition and access.

But mostly, the No campaign won by making sure people didn’t understand what they were voting on. Confusion was the product. Fear was the delivery mechanism.

Nobody manufactured that confusion more effectively than News Corp, the Rupert Murdoch media empire that controls roughly seventy percent of Australia’s print media and runs the country’s only dedicated 24-hour “news” channel, Sky News Australia.

In the aftermath of the referendum, researchers from three universities spent months systematically analysing everything News Corp published and broadcast about The Voice campaigns. What they found went beyond what we normally call media bias. Bias implies a journalist with a point of view. News Corp was the arena, the floor, the walls and the ceiling, and it was built for one team.

The vast majority of commentary across The Australian, the Herald Sun, The Daily Telegraph and Sky News pushed the No case. But here is what is more telling than the raw numbers: the Yes campaign’s central argument reflected how constitutional change actually works in Australia, and this is worth explaining clearly, because News Corp made sure most people never heard it.

You don’t legislate the details before a referendum. You can’t. First, the public votes to establish the principle — in this case, that First Peoples deserve a formal mechanism for being consulted on policies that affect them. Then, if the vote succeeds, parliament writes the legislation that determines exactly how it works. Detail comes after principle. That is not vagueness. That is the how the legal process unfolds.

News Corp gave that explanation 722 words across the entire campaign.

The opposing claim, that nobody knew how The Voice would work and therefore we shouldn’t vote for it, received nearly 38,000.

“If you don’t know, vote no” became the No campaign’s most effective slogan. Someone had to make sure people didn’t know. That job wasn’t left to chance.

Senior Sky News commentator and former LNP political advisor Peta Credlin was one of the most visible architects of that confusion. She spent days promoting a conspiracy theory that the Uluru Statement from the Heart, a single, elegantly written document of 439 words, was secretly a 26-page manifesto concealing a radical left-wing agenda: a push for a separate Black government, land reparations and the eventual dismantling of what she implied was the Australia her audience recognised and belonged to.

It was false. Provably, demonstrably false. But the damage was done. Once a lie enters the ecosystem at the kind of amplified volume that News Corp commands, the correction never travels at the same speed or goes the same distance.

Former Prime Ministers Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull, despite coming from opposite sides of politics, have both described News Corp as behaving less like a news organisation and more like a political party. After watching the referendum coverage, it is very hard to argue with them.

The damage done by The Voice didn’t stay contained to the referendum. The same framing, that Indigenous recognition practices are “divisive,” that they are being “rammed down our throats,” that ordinary Australians are sick of them, migrated directly into the Welcome to Country debate.

The word “divisive” was used so thoroughly and so often that it now appears in poll questions as though it’s a neutral descriptor rather than a deliberate framing choice. Ask people whether something is divisive after years of being told it is divisive, and they will tell you it is divisive. That is not polling public opinion. That is measuring the effectiveness of a campaign.

This brings me to something that deserves more honest conversation than it usually gets.

Research from Western Sydney University found that Australians who react most strongly against Indigenous recognition are more likely to hold a belief, not always articulated and often not even conscious, that their identity and belonging in Australia is under threat. Politicians and media figures have deliberately seized Welcome and Acknowledgement of Country ceremonies and made them symbols of that anxiety. The story their messaging tells is that they represent an acknowledgement that this land belonged to someone before it belonged to “us,” and that “us” is a story built on dispossession.

That is genuinely uncomfortable to sit with - mainly because it happens to be true. However, experiencing discomfort in the face of that history is not shameful. It is deeply human. The problem is what happens next.

When we are given nowhere honest to go with our discomfort, when there is no public language for processing it, no education that makes room for it and a media environment that actively redirects it toward anger and resentment, it curdles. It becomes the conviction that we are the victims. That an Elder’s heartfelt welcome is actually an accusation. That a sixty-second ceremony inviting you to come together on shared land is an attack on your way of life.

This is what researchers call “white fragility”. This is not a slur, but a clinical description of a predictable psychological response to experiencing identity threat. It is being weaponised by people who understand exactly what they are doing.

There is a particular brutality to this fight being staged on Anzac Day.

Approximately a thousand First Peoples Australians served in the First World War. Somewhere between three and four thousand served in the Second, despite laws that for much of that period either restricted or outright prohibited their enlistment. They found ways in anyway: false names, having pale enough skin. The sheer force of wanting to serve a country that did not yet consider them full citizens.

They came home to a country that denied them the same benefits it gave to white returning soldiers. They were barred from RSL clubs, because those clubs served alcohol and Aboriginal people were legally prohibited from drinking. Their names were not on our memorials. Their stories were not in our histories. For decades, they were functionally invisible in the official record of the conflicts they had fought in.

Aunty Di Ryder stood at a microphone at a dawn service to welcome people onto her Country and was jeered by people claiming to defend Anzac values. The booing grew louder as she described her own service.

I think about my father at moments like this. A veteran without an association, a man whose service existed in a kind of official nowhere. I think about what it would have meant to him to be welcomed. To have someone stand up and say: we see what you gave. We see what you lost. You are not invisible here.

That is what Welcome to Country offers. That is what is being booed.

I don’t believe that the majority stood with those booing. The crowd at the Melbourne Shrine that drowned out the disruptors with applause, fifty thousand people standing in the dark at five in the morning, that was a real act of resistance. The RSL leadership calling the booing the most disgraceful thing they had ever heard is a real act of leadership. Uncle Ray Minniecon describing a full minute of it as “water off a duck’s back,” with the composure of a man who has given up being surprised by us but not given up on us, that is a real act of courage.

But the majority is not the problem. The majority, when they actually encounter Welcome to Country without the noise, responds with the openness and basic human warmth the ceremony invites.

Starting with honest history education in our schools would help, not the version of Australian history that left whole generations without any framework for understanding reconciliation, but the actual history. The Stolen Generations. The frontier wars. The soldiers who came home to nothing. The land. Knowing our history is not an act of self-flagellation. It is the foundation of the kind of pride in a country that actually means something.

Naming the double standard of the Lord’s Prayer clearly and consistently would help. Every time a politician criticises Welcome to Country while sitting in a parliament that opens with a prayer representing thirteen percent of the population, someone should say so. Not aggressively. Just clearly. It should be used as s a genuine question for reflection: are we applying this standard consistently, or only to the culture we’ve decided is the unwelcome one?

Crucially, ceasing to allow the loudest voices to hijack and set the agenda of our national conversations would help most of all. The people booing at dawn services are still fringe. The IPA does not speak for Australia. One Nation is not reflective of mainstream thinking. And News Corp’s columnists are not the voice of the working class, whatever they might claim. They are the voice of a media empire with specific political interests, and those interests do not include reconciliation between the people of our country.

The conversation most Australians would likely have around Welcome to Country, if they had it without all the noise, is a much more generous one. We have seen it happen. At the Shrine, on the morning of April 25, fifty thousand people proved it.

Welcome to Country ends, as it begins, in generosity.

After everything, the dispossession, the children taken, the languages suppressed, the history erased, the veterans ignored, the referendum drowned in misinformation, the Elders are still extending their hand. Still welcoming strangers onto Country. Still asking only that we respect the place we have been given the gift of living in.

My father has never been extended the kind of acknowledgement that thousands of Australians are shown on Anzac Day. There was no ceremony for a Rhodesian Bush War veteran who arrived quietly, carrying a history that didn't fit any of the available categories. He built his life here, as displaced people do, thoroughly, gratefully and without complaint. But I think about what it might have meant to him, hearing an Elder and a veteran welcome him to Country and acknowledge his service. A man who had already lost one country and arrived at the edge of another, to have someone stand up and say: we see you. You are not invisible here. Welcome.

That is what is being booed. That is what politicians are calling divisive.

A welcome.

The question has never really been whether Welcome to Country is appropriate.

The question is whether we are.

With acknowledgement of the Traditional Owners of Country throughout Australia, and respect to Elders past, present and emerging - and to all those veterans, known and unknown, whose service has never been fully seen.

This piece draws on research from the Murdoch Referendum Accountability Project (International Journal of Communication, 2024); the Challenging Racism Project at Western Sydney University; Wilson et al. (2025), “Voiceless: Division, Distrust and Discrimination at the 2023 Voice Referendum,” Australian Journal of Social Issues, citing political analyst Peter Brent (2023); Reconciliation Australia; and reporting from Anzac Day ceremonies in 2025 and 2026. The Gukurahundi massacres (1983-1987) are documented by the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum and the Catholic Commission for Justice and Peace in Zimbabwe. Information on New Zealand’s approach to Indigenous history draws on a visit to the Auckland War Memorial Museum and publicly available information on Te Tiriti o Waitangi/The Treaty of Waitangi. Any and all mistakes around the description of First People’s ceremony and culture are my own.

A total stranger - an older Thai lady, also in her flower shirt but holding a much bigger and more powerful water gun - has just absolutely nailed me from three feet away and is looking enormously pleased with herself. I retaliate. She throws back her head and lets out a belly laugh at the difference between the power of our guns, which makes everyone else laugh too. Her friends are all getting involved in the mayhem as are mine. For the next few hours, nobody here is a stranger, nobody is in adult-mode and nobody is worried about anything at all.

This is Songkran! This is the Thai New Year! This year the festival saw record numbers out on the streets with over 210,000 people turning up to the biggest water play area in Silom, just one location among hundreds, to do exactly this! The only goal - to run around in the street getting soaked by strangers and to love every second of it.

What I started to notice this year wasn’t just the scale of it, but who wasn’t out playing. There are always people who hold themselves slightly apart from it all, who don’t allow themselves to let go and join in. I notice it in schools too. When children play Songkran, the teachers and support staff are usually right in the thick of things, soaked, laughing and fully involved. Leadership is often nowhere to be seen.

It is difficult not to notice how often those same people are the ones making serious decisions about the systems which the rest of us have to live within.

I have lived in Bangkok for fourteen years and have come out to play Songkran many times. Every year, I find myself wondering the same thing: why don’t we do this more? Not the water fights specifically (though honestly yes, more water fights - especially in the Bangkok heat) but giving ourselves permission to be unserious. To fully embrace the collective decision to put down the performance of adulthood for a day and just... play.

The word Songkran comes from the Sanskrit saṁkrānti which means “to move, to transition, to pass into”. It marks the moment the traditional solar calendar, when the sun moves from Pisces into Aries, celebrating the great astrological passage into a new year.

This festival has been celebrated across South and Southeast Asia for thousands of years, originating as a Hindu harvest festival. Over time, it absorbed Buddhist meaning as it travelled with monks along trade routes, eventually taking root here in Thailand during the Ayutthaya empire.

What we are participating in during modern times, around the streets of Bangkok and throughout the many regions of Thailand, is not a party, despite looking like exactly that! Rather, it is an ancient ceremony that stretches back further than many modern nation-states have existed. The water is ritual, signifying the washing away of the year just passed, while simultaneously blessing what comes next. Young people pour water scented with perfume, flowers and petals over the hands of their elders. Families visit temples to gently wash statues of Buddha and communities welcome loved ones who return from afar.

Then they absolutely drench each other with water in the streets.

This balance is one of the things that I love most about Thai culture. The sacred and the joyful are not opposites here, but are part of the same gesture. You go to temple, you go home and offer prayers. But after the serious rituals are complete, millions of Thais will then gear up, get out there and play - because this, too, is how the Thai people mark what matters. Thailand has never met a holiday it didn’t love and they don’t turn down an opportunity to get together and party. I truly believe that there is deep seated wisdom in this balance.

I say all of this, knowing I will never fully belong here - even after fourteen years, I am still very much a guest in Thailand. However belonging, I’m learning, isn’t always about fitting into a mould. It’s often more about how we choose to participate.

When I head out into the streets to dive into Songkran festivities, I am not pretending to be Thai, nor am I adopting the Buddhist religion as my own. Instead, I am accepting an invitation to join in and honour the traditions of the country I’ve made my home. I am briefly holding the same thread as everyone else - the water, the shared moments of laughter, my body moving through the world in a crowd of people who, for those hours, are all doing the same thing.

That is enough. Sometimes that is everything.

I believe that this is the power that ceremony holds, because it offers even the outsider a way to belong, even if only for a moment.

Thailand is not alone in this understanding. First Peoples Australians have carried, for tens of thousands of years, a relationship between ceremony, play, country and community that makes no distinction between them — because they are not distinct. They are one continuous whole.

First peoples children do not learn about the world through instruction. They learn through the world, through story told on Country, through movement, through ceremony, through the layered web of kinship that tells each child exactly who they are and where they belong, long before they are old enough to ask.

Play was and has never been separate from culture. It is how culture is transmitted, body to body, generation to generation, across an unbroken line stretching back further than most of us can imagine.

That continuity is not accidental. It is the architecture of a people. Then we broke it.

Now here is where I want to make a connection between the importance of adult play and how our children are developing so stick with me, because the more I sit with it, the harder it is to ignore that many of us adults seem to have quietly decided that play is something we grew out of.

The role of play in our adult lives is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately — I’m not just talking about Songkran play, with all its madness, but about play as a fundamental biological need. As I’ve been learning more about it, I have started asking friends how they engage in play as adults, and the responses have been interesting.

Many of those I’ve asked struggled at first to come up with an answer, saying things like, “Ooh, I need to think about this for a minute.” When answers do come, people often mention the gym, team sports, video games, book clubs, creating art or music or writing, and, of course, playing with their children. For others, though, the answer is harder to find.

Stuart Brown, one of the leading researchers on play, has spent decades studying what happens to mammals when opportunities for play are removed from their developmental process. The results are eye-opening. Play-deprived mammals tend to develop abnormally when measuring social, emotional and neurological capacity. They often struggle to read social cues, find it difficult to regulate themselves and have trouble forming strong bonds within their communities. They become measurably less capable of navigating the world.

We are mammals. For us, these patterns are not metaphorical.

Yet, when it comes to the systems within which our children spend their time, it’s hard not to notice that many of the people designing them no longer seem to understand the value of play themselves. So we build environments that contradict what we know about human development, and then wonder why the outcomes are so poor.

We have built schools where children sit indoors, often in rows of desks, and are asked to exist from the neck up. We have built juvenile detention facilities where children are placed in concrete cells at precisely the developmental moment when they need movement, choice, stimulus and connection most. We have built systems measured by compliance and control, and then we find ourselves wondering why children, who are biologically wired to learn through their bodies, through play and through the negotiation of a social world, are not thriving within them.

Throughout my teaching career, I have worked in both play-based learning environments and more rigid, content-driven ones. I have seen what happens when children are given space to lead their own learning, when they are able to move, to make, to negotiate, to fail safely and try again.

I have seen children who struggled in a traditional classroom, suddenly find their feet and thrive in a play-based one - even within the same school. This doesn’t happen because the expectations are lower. They aren’t.

In play-based settings, educators are watching closely and to a wide range of developmental moments which evidence how our students are learning. We pay attention to how each child grips materials, how they coordinate themselves, how rhythm develops. We notice whether they can sustain attention, how their mark-making evolves, how confidently they move through social situations. We observe speech and language development and how they relate to one another and to us. We see all of this and much, much more.

The difference is that we observe it through play, which means we see each child as they actually are, rather than through the lens of a content-driven environment that pushes them to perform before they are developmentally ready.

What play-based environments produce, and what rows of desks cannot, is connectedness. A child who knows how to negotiate the social world. A child who has a whole self to bring to that negotiation. This is not a soft outcome. This is the foundation of everything.

In my last article, I wrote about children as young as ten being held in detention in Australian prisons. When I think about these children, my mind immediately goes to my own students. I think about how each child behaves - their energy, their movement, their noise, their chaos, their humour. I think about placing any one of these dynamic young humans in a concrete cell and I want to be clear: it would be torture. Not metaphorical torture. Torture.

A child in a cell is a bird in a cage.

For First Peoples children, this is not simply metaphor but a specific and compounding violence. Country, in First Peoples understanding, is not just a place. It is a living relational system of kinship, story, law, ceremony and belonging that a child is born into and learns to navigate through exactly the kinds of embodied, connected experiences we have been talking about.

To remove a First Peoples child from Country is not simply a matter of changing their address. When we lock them in a cell, we sever these children from identity, relationships, spiritual life, teachers and their sense of who they are in the world, all at once.

A concrete cell cannot rehabilitate a child back into that. It only deepens the cut.

This is far from abstract. First Peoples children are catastrophically overrepresented in Australian detention facilities. Generations of policy decisions have systematically severed these children from the conditions they need in order to become whole.

The box is not a solution to that history. In too many cases, it is the continuation of dogmatic colonial policy dressed up as ‘crime reform’.

We know that most young people in detention are not there because they are irredeemably dangerous. Most of them end up incarcerated as the result of poor decision-making and a total lack of judgement, and as I wrote last week, many have not even been charged with a crime. Many of these children, given adequate time for their brains to fully develop and the compassion of a second chance, will grow out of it. The neuroscience supports this claim.

The adolescent brain is not a smaller version of an adult one, it’s a different system entirely. It is fast, reactive, still under construction. Signals misfire, emotions flood and decisions are made impulsively before the body catches up. This is development, not dysfunction. Risk-taking, poor impulse control, and the desperate need for peer belonging are features of a brain in development, not character flaws that deserve punishment.

But here is the question that is really burning for me here: what are we trying to achieve by placing these children behind bars?

If the answer is rehabilitation — for these children to one day return to their communities and live their lives well — then what does rehabilitation require? Put simply, it requires healing. That healing, for a young person, needs what it has always needed: safety, connection, movement and opportunities to engage in play. Bessel van der Kolk, whose work on trauma has changed how we understand the body and recovery, is unambiguous on this point. Trauma is held in the body and so must be released through the body. The most natural way human beings have always done this, across every culture, across all of recorded history, is through play.

Furthermore, almost every therapy that actually works borrows from play. The safety to experiment. The freedom to express. The ability to try on different versions of yourself without permanent consequence. The presence of other people who are doing the same. Remove those conditions and it becomes very hard to call what’s left over “rehabilitation”. The system might still function, but it stops doing the thing it claims to do.

Australia, it is 2026 and given we are now firmly in the Digital Revolution, I find myself constantly asking the same questions:

What is the purpose of school? What do we want our schools to look like going forwards?

Are they to be a continuation of what we have inherited, relics of the Industrial Revolution? Do we want them to be factories for compliance, places where our children have their curiosity quieted in favour of fitting into the neat and ill-fitting boxes that we design for them?

Or do we want our schools to be environments that nurture and grow their curiosity about the world, and where they become flexible, empathetic human beings who can solve problems we haven’t imagined yet, from perspectives we haven’t considered?

These are not small questions and as we reckon with the advent of AI, massive destabilisation to the existing world order and the specter of climate change, they require serious consideration by us all. We already acknowledge that the world which our children is inheriting, along with all of its problems, won’t reward conformity. It will demand creativity, resilience and the capacity to collaborate across differences in culture, belief and language.

Rows of desks do not produce community or collaboration. Standardised tests do not measure creativity or curiosity. And critically, adults who have lost touch with play, who have been so thoroughly socialised into seriousness that joy begins to feel like a threat to order, should not be the ones designing systems for our children.

Alongside our schools, we also need to look at what we are doing in our juvenile justice system. If we’re intent to ignore our commitment to the Declaration of the Rights of the Child by continuing to imprison children as young as ten in this country, what should we then expect when it comes to rehabilitation?

Because right now, in too many cases, it is a concrete box. A child in a box does not heal. Their growth, physical, social and emotional, is stunted, and over time this can harden into a lifelong experience of incarceration.

Introduce play and we might all be surprised by how much the conditions shift. Movement returns. Choice returns. Connection returns. In those spaces, young people can practice regulation, rebuild trust, and learn how to be with others again. It does not erase what has happened, but it does change what becomes possible.

We, the adults, are making choices. We are making them right now, in this political moment, in this cultural mood that keeps reaching backwards toward a toughness and order that has never once produced even close to what it has promised. We are making choices that will shape the adults who our children will become. I want us to make those choices as if each child in our classrooms or prisons could be our own child. I want us to be smarter, to listen to the science and to remember that the children are the point. Not our nostalgia. Not our anxiety. Not our need for control or simplicity. Them.

We return to the soaking wet streets of Bangkok. We come back to the woman with the water gun and the flower shirt who had absolutely no interest in whether I was Australian or foreign or belonged here or didn’t. She just wanted to get me, and she did and then we laughed about it together.

Play is not what we do when the serious work is done nor should it be regarded as a reward for good behaviour. Play is how we find each other. It is how children learn who they are, as they are becoming. It is how many kinds of trauma begin to heal. It is how a city of millions becomes, for a few days every April, something that feels briefly like one enormous family soaking one another in the street.

The Thais understood this long before the neuroscientists caught up. Every year, at the hottest time, when the sun passes from one phase into the next, they pour water over everything — the Buddhas, their elders, total strangers — and wash away the year that was. They have been doing this for a thousand years.

There might be something in that worth learning.

So… what are you waiting for? It’s never too late to play!

A range of theories surfaced quickly: Mistaken identity, illegal vape shop, organised crime. Possibly insurance fraud or tax evasion. A kind of collaborative detective work had taken over, half speculation, half storytelling.

Then, right on cue: “It’s the Muslims.”

It was almost predictable. Someone else in the thread pushed back and asked why. The reply came just as quickly. “It’s their modus operandi,” followed by a string of loosely assembled talking points about immigration and crime, and then the familiar call to action: we need harsher sentences, tougher laws.

What struck me about this exchange wasn’t the comment itself, I’ve seen hundreds just like it. What was odd was the tone. It was polite, measured. Considered, even. The person responding actually explained that they’d self-censored a swear word because the original poster was of “gentle nature,” despite holding a fairly militant stance on sentencing. It was all so reasonable on the surface, which is exactly what made it unsettling.

Sitting there reading it, I found myself returning to something had said to me recently.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how our views are shaped - and often distorted - by powerful media and business interests, in One Nation. Thirty Years of Nothing. Marcia pushed back on that framing, not to dismiss it, but to widen it. These conversations matter, she said, but we cannot lose sight of what follows. Populist politics doesn’t just benignly shape how our opinions form. It has real consequences, and it lands hardest on those who are already carrying the heaviest burdens.

I could see exactly what she meant, playing out line by line in that thread.

This is because the language of these conversations rarely announces itself as harmful. Instead, it often feels logical. The conclusions seem reasonable and the tone feels restrained. However, the outcome is anything but neutral. Calls for harsher penalties and tougher laws do not fall evenly across society and they never have.

In places like the bayside suburbs of Melbourne, where conversations like this unfold over coffee and comment sections, the people calling for harsher sentences are rarely the ones who will feel them. Our children are not the ones being picked up by police just for walking home. Our neighbours are not the ones being refused bail because their housing doesn’t look stable enough on paper. The consequences land somewhere else entirely and it’s almost always on those already pushed to the edges of belonging. It lands on immigrant communities and First Peoples, on people whose lives the legal system has never been designed to protect.

Most of us who sit in these conversations never stop to ask why that is, or why the push for harsher laws never seems to find its way back to our own streets.

I didn’t used to question it either. Then last week, I read that two young First Peoples men had died in custody in the Northern Territory within a week of each other.

One, a 26-year-old, died inside a Darwin correctional centre. The other, a 25-year-old, was arrested, placed in the back of a police van, and never came home. They are two of the twelve First Peoples to die in custody in Australia so far this year, and we have only just hit April.

As I read about their deaths, I found myself remembering the words of Yorta Yorta woman Apryl Day, who I heard speak at the Melbourne Invasion Day march earlier this year. She shared the story of her mother Tanya, who died in custody in Victoria in 2017. Apryl’s words have stayed with me since hearing them, because her story described not just a death, but the death of a person. Her mother. A woman the system had failed at every point of contact.

It made me reckon with something uncomfortable. Seventeen years living outside Australia had allowed me to hold onto a version of this country that was far too generous. I had assumed this was something we had faced and were working through. That it was getting better. What struck me was not just that these deaths were still happening, but that somewhere along the way, I had simply stopped asking whether they were.

So I started reading and what I found was disturbing. First the deaths, then the numbers behind them. And then, deeper in the same data, something else stopped me cold.

Here, in Australia, we are jailing children as young as ten. Not because they have been convicted of anything, and in many cases, not even because they have been charged. Children the same age as the primary school students I’ve spent the past twenty years teaching, held in cells while the legal system decides what to do with them next.

This broke something open in me - not just grief, but a specific, cold kind of fury. Because this is not happening by accident and the worst part, for me, was realising it had never once occurred to me to ask what role my own silence plays in allowing it to continue.

We Australians believe that we protect our children. The more I look into it, the more I realise that this is only true for some.

A 10-year-old is in Grade 4 or Grade 5. They regularly lose their water bottles. They constantly forget simple instructions and need to be reminded to name their work. Children at this age are still learning how to regulate their emotions, how to manage their impulses, how to understand that consequences follow the decisions made in the moment. Their brains are, by every measure of developmental science, still in the process of forming, and anyone who has spent time in a classroom with pre-adolescent children knows just how much support sits underneath even the smallest decisions they make.

Now place that child in a prison cell. Not because they have been found guilty of anything. Just alone, locked up and waiting.

This is where those casual social media comments actually land. Not in Bayside. Not in the suburbs where the rhetoric gets shared around. Here.

Let’s consider a hypothetical. Two boys, both thirteen, each responsible for an act of vandalism.

One is from Bayside Melbourne. The other is a First Peoples child from regional Victoria.

The law says they start in the same place: Children’s Court, with detention used only as a last resort. The same factors are weighed in each case - the seriousness of the offence, risk to the community, likelihood of reoffending, and what support systems are in place. That’s the theory.

In practice, those support systems do most of the work.

In Bayside, they are easy to demonstrate. They include stable housing and school engagement. Parents who can show up in court, meet bail conditions and advocate for their child. Legal representation that can build a case for rehabilitation. The justice system recognises this picture as safe, so the pathway leans toward bail, toward supervision and toward keeping that child in the community.

For a First Peoples child in regional Victoria, the legal framework is identical but the inputs are not. Housing may appear less stable, making bail harder to secure. Prior police contact, even for minor matters, follows them into the courtroom. Support services are thinner and while community networks are often strong, they don’t always fit the narrow definition the system recognises, which centres parents as primary carers and has no language for kinship structures.

So the same factors produce different outcomes. Risk is assessed as higher and bail becomes harder to justify, so the pathway shifts.

Many of these children will spend longer in custody waiting for their case to be heard than they would have served if sentenced outright.

The kid from a well-resourced suburb who commits the same offence is far more likely to be cautioned, sent home and wrapped back into a system that assumes he will be alright. His peer in Aboriginal Australia is far more likely to be locked up: not convicted, not sentenced, just marking time.

It might be the same offence, but it is often leads to a profoundly different experience of the law.

This pattern is not unique to First Peoples communities either. Any group already framed as a risk, whether through race, religion or postcode, is more likely to feel the sharper edge of these decisions. One comment, one assumption and an entire community becomes suspect before a court date is ever set.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are 27 times more likely to be jailed than non-Indigenous children. They make up 65% of all children behind bars in this country, and around four in five have not been convicted of anything. This is not a justice system responding to proven crime. It is a system detaining children - many of them primary school age - before guilt has even been established. In NSW, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania, the age of criminal responsibility is ten years of age; in the ACT, Northern Territory and Victoria it is twelve. This remains the law today.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Australia signed in 1990, states that detention must be used only as a last resort, for the shortest possible time. It also recommends a minimum age for detention of fourteen. We signed it. We don’t follow it. The gap between what we promised and what we actually do falls almost entirely on First Peoples children, and it is widening.

You are paying for this.

Roughly $176 of your tax each year goes toward keeping children in cells before they have been found guilty of anything. Ten-year-olds.

At the same time, teachers are striking over poor pay and worsening conditions. We are told there is not enough money for schools, for support services, for early intervention. But of course, there is money and this is where some of it is going.

Furthermore it does not stop there, because the same questions — Who benefits? and At whose expense? — run through more of our public spending than most of us realise.

We have been hearing a great deal recently, about the push to tax our gas exports. I wonder though, have you ever stopped to consider what the current arrangement costs you personally?

Roughly another $1,000 of what you earn and contribute in taxes moves, invisibly, through a system that allows gas companies to take $149 billion worth of Australian gas for free over four years. Not discounted. Not negotiated. Free. More than half of all gas exported from Australia attracts zero royalty payments. We give it away, and then we buy it back at tripled prices. One Japanese company operating in Australian waters, exports more gas each year than is used in NSW, Victoria and South Australia combined and paid no royalties and no corporate tax on $21 billion in exports over a decade.

We are, in the most literal sense, paying foreign companies to take what is ours - to the tune of about a thousand dollars each, every single year.

Now ask who benefits from all of this - from the prisons and from the gas. The answer, of course, sits in the same financial system.

Macquarie Capital, Australia’s largest investment bank, is a direct financial partner in Australia’s largest prison, the Clarence Correctional Centre near Grafton in NSW. Macquarie is simultaneously one of the world’s leading investors in metals and mining, including Australian resources.

BlackRock and Vanguard, the two largest asset managers on earth, are the biggest institutional shareholders in GEO Group, one of the four private prison companies operating in Australia. They are also among the largest shareholders in Rio Tinto, which mines on Aboriginal land in the Pilbara.

More than half of Australia’s critical minerals mines lie within formally recognised Indigenous lands. In the Northern Territory alone, mining on Aboriginal land accounts for more than 80% of the Territory’s total mineral value.

Now, this is not a conspiracy in the way we tend to imagine them. No dark rooms. No single group pulling the strings. What it is, is a system built piece by piece through law and policy, in which the same outcomes keep showing up for the same people.

When First People’s communities are weakened through incarceration, decision-makers are removed. The structures that sustain culture and connection to Country are fractured. It becomes easier for other interests to move in. The profits that follow are not accidental. They are the result of decisions, made over generations, about who holds power, whose voices count, and whose land can be accessed.

Detain a child early and you have not punished a crime. You have manufactured a future one and the evidence on this is uncontested. Children who pass through detention are significantly more likely to return to the justice system as adults. The experience of incarceration - the disruption to education, the exposure to institutionalisation, the severing of family and community ties and the stigma that follows a child back into a world that now sees them differently - does not rehabilitate. It embeds.

A child detained at ten is more likely to be in a remand cell at twenty-five than a child who was never detained, regardless of what they originally did to end up there. In Australia, 44.5% of people released from prison return within two years. Three in five adult prisoners have been incarcerated before. The system is not breaking a cycle. It is the cycle.

Now look at who is inside it.

On any given night in Australia, approximately 1 in every 10,000 non-Indigenous children aged 10 to 17 is in detention. That number has been steady or falling for years.

For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, the number is 27 in every 10,000 and it has been steadily rising. In Western Australia the situation is worse still: Aboriginal children are nearly 25 times more likely to be incarcerated than non-Indigenous children. In the Northern Territory, Aboriginal young people make up 42% of the 10 to 17 year old population but 96% of those in detention.

Read that again. Ninety-six percent.

For most non-Indigenous Australian families, youth detention is something that happens to other people’s children. Statistically, it is almost invisible in our lives. The rate is so low - just 1 in 10,000 - that most of us will never know a family directly touched by it. This is precisely why it does not become a political emergency. The people with the loudest political voices, the most media access, the most capacity to demand change? Our children are generally safe. We do not need to think about this, and so, most of us don’t.

First Peoples families don’t have the same luxury. For them, this is not a statistic. These numbers come with names. They are a sibling, a cousin, a nephew, a grandchild. They are the absences in the school photo and the subjects of phone calls no family should ever have to receive.

For First Peoples children, the impact of detention is compounded by something the numbers alone cannot capture. Detention does not just remove a child from a family. It removes a child from Country, from language, from the kinship systems that are the architecture of identity and belonging in First Peoples culture. That severance is not a side effect and for many children, it becomes irreversible. Communities lose not just a child, but the adult that child would have become: the future decision-maker, the knowledge-holder and the person who would have stood on that Country and spoken for it.

The system that detained them then expands to hold them again.

Our tax dollars fund that cycle, and they have been doing so for a very long time.

The companies contracted to provide that containment are among the least transparent recipients of public funds in the country. Serco, which runs Australia’s largest prison and was paid $167 million in a single year to do so, paid $45.9 million in tax on $3.05 billion in Australian revenue across three years. GEO Group made $1.46 billion in Australian revenue across the same period and paid nothing.

The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody identified this logic in 1991 and handed down 339 recommendations to interrupt it. Most of these have never been implemented and since then, more than 617 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have died in custody.

In 2024–25, Australia recorded the highest number of Indigenous deaths in custody since 1979.

Come back to the simplest version of this.

We went to work this year. We paid tax. Here is what it paid for:

It paid for children to sit in jail cells before they had been charged with anything. It paid gas companies to take $149 billion worth of Australian resources for free, while your energy bills tripled. It paid British and American prison companies to profit from incarcerating First Peoples on Country that has always belonged to them.

Meanwhile, the loudest voices in our media have been telling us that environmental protections are what’s holding Australia back - too much red tape strangling the economy, green ideology blocking growth. What they rarely mention is that those protections are often the last legal mechanism standing between mining companies and unrestricted access to Country that has never been purchased and was certainly never freely given.

Two young First Peoples men died in custody in the Northern Territory last week. Twelve this year. Six hundred and seventeen since the Royal Commission that was supposed to stop it. Their families are still waiting for answers that have not come in thirty-four years.

We say we protect our children. I have said it myself, for most of my life, without ever stopping to ask whether I meant all of them.

The hard truth is that we don’t.

Some children are held close. Others are held in cells.

The information included in this piece is taken from publicly available data and reporting. Rather than sharing a full bibliography, here are some of the main organisations and voices worth following if, like me, this issue has prompted you to inquire into this further:

First Peoples legal services and advocacy The voices that matter most on this issue are those of First Peoples and organisations who have been speaking about it for decades. I found the following sites useful:

• NATSILS (National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services): natsils.org.au

• Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service (VALS): vals.org.au

• Redfern Legal Centre: rlc.org.au

• Australian Human Rights Commission — Social Justice Commissioner: humanrights.gov.au

Data and research You can find the most up-to-date official statistics and data from the following sources:

• Australian Institute of Criminology — Deaths in Custody annual reports: aic.gov.au

• Australian Institute of Health and Welfare — Youth Detention Population reports: aihw.gov.au

• Productivity Commission — Closing the Gap Dashboard: pc.gov.au/closing-the-gap-data

• NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research: bocsar.nsw.gov.au

• Victorian Crime Statistics: crimestatistics.vic.gov.au

Investigative journalism and analysis

• The Justice Map (Substack covering private prisons and lobbying): thejusticemap.substack.com

• The Australia Institute (Gas subsidies and fossil fuel research): australiainstitute.org.au

• Michael West Media (Corporate tax transparency reporting): michaelwest.com.au

• NITV / SBS (First Nations news and reporting): sbs.com.au/nitv

If you or someone you know needs support

• 13YARN

  (24/7 crisis support for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples): 13 92 76

• Lifeline: 13 11 14

That’s how many of us experience the news these days, which isn’t really our fault. I believe it’s the direct result of how we were taught to engage with subjects like history at school. Right now, we are watching the very real consequences of history play out, in the states of northern Africa and West Asia, known in colonial terms as the Middle East. For many of us, the historical literacy required to really understand the implications of what we are seeing unfold isn’t strong enough, leaving us with an incomplete picture of what’s actually at stake.

In most Western and European school curriculums, history has been slowly and quietly eroded in importance. Rather than being taught year-round as a core subject, it’s now often rolled up into a three-month unit alongside other “less important” subjects like Geography, Economics and Health. Then we carve it up even further into topics. The First Fleet. Federation. Colonialism. The World Wars.

It’s important to say this clearly: this is not the fault of teachers. Many of us no longer have the time or, in many cases, the training to teach history properly.

Rather, it’s the result of decisions made by successive governments who, despite talking about the importance of history, have quietly deprioritised it in favour of subjects like maths and science. The outcome is both short-sighted and predictable. A subject that should help students understand the stories of humankind and how we’ve become what we are today, has been reduced to a handful of disconnected units taught in a mere time frame of hours.

What gets lost is the connective thread: the continuous, living story that links those chapters to each other, as well as to right now. We’re rarely given the time to develop the critical thinking skills needed to make connections between the world we’re scrolling through this morning and what has happened in the past. To understand that today is simply the latest development in an epic saga that’s been running for thousands of years and that we’re part of it… we just weren’t given the script.

The result is a population that keeps encountering the consequences of history without any of the context. We don’t understand why things are happening, so we can’t begin to predict where they might be going. Our decisions are completely untethered from the forces that actually shape how things turn out and most worryingly, this increasingly includes many of the people we elect to make those decisions on our behalf.

Here’s the frustrating part - the teaching tools we need to fix this already exist. Researchers at Harvard’s Project Zero, a group that has spent decades working out how people actually learn, developed a set of simple thinking frameworks called Thinking Routines.

A group of their researchers, Ron Ritchhart, Mark Church and Karin Morrison, first published Making Thinking Visible in 2011, a book that brought together the first wave of these routines, one of which is called Zoom In. The idea is straightforward: you look at something up close, examining the detail in front of you. While “Zoom Out” isn’t formally named in the routine, it naturally emerges as the next step, as we pull back to see the bigger picture, then further still, moving across contexts and scales until you can see how the small thing fits into the larger story. It’s a way of thinking that lends itself almost perfectly to studying history across time, rather than in isolated national chapters.

Yet, this isn’t how most of us were taught to engage with history, let alone with our own histories.

My personal history was never located within the broader Australian narrative. My family and I arrived from Zimbabwe after independence. Our history stretches back through Africa and into parts of Europe long before that. However, none of that ever connected to what I was being taught at school. There, history was something that happened here in Australia, to other people, in a version of the past that didn’t seem to have much to do with my own.

It wasn’t that I found history uninteresting. On the contrary, I chose to study it at university. What was missing from my learning though, was the opportunity to place my own story alongside the one I was being taught, to see where they intersected and where they diverged, and to understand how both connected to the world I was actually living in.

It is important for us to remember that history isn’t just information. It’s how we come to understand where we belong in the world.

Imagine if we taught history differently, not as a sequence of isolated topics, but by comparing what was happening across the world during the same period of time. Inquiring into what events were unfolding in different regions, on different continents, and how those stories intersected, collided and shaped one another. From there, students could begin to locate themselves within that wider story, not just through the country they live in, but through the histories their own families carry and the paths that brought them here.

When you start to look at history this way, those connections, once pushed to the sidelines, begin to quietly fill the gaps in the louder stories we’re told, and become much harder to ignore.

A student in Melbourne whose grandparents were born in Lebanon isn’t separate from the history of the Middle East, they’re living inside it every day whether consciously or not. Their story sits within a much larger tale; one that is shaped by the way European powers carved up the region after World War One, by the civil war that tore Lebanon apart, and by the waves of migration that followed.

Seen in isolation, those events can feel distant, like something that happened somewhere else to someone else. Placed within a broader timeline, they begin to explain how that student came to be sitting in a classroom in Melbourne today. As we gradually continue to widen the lens, we begin to recognise similar patterns shaping events in other places. In turn, this opens up a more empathetic understanding of people whose histories might look different on the surface, but in reality, might not be so different after all.

That’s the shift.

When history stops being something we learn about, it starts becoming something we can each use to understand who we are, where we are and how we got here.

Teaching history this way, zooming in and out, moving between the personal and the global, produces something completely different from the sealed-room, topic-based model. It produces people who can read a situation and a citizenry who, when something kicks off somewhere in the world, have some sense of the deeper forces underneath it and why these matter.

What it does not produce, is the kind of leader who looks at Iran and thinks, “this all started in 1979”. When we strip away that context, this is what we’re currently left with.

So let’s look at what’s actually in front of us when it comes to Iran, because the history here is doing a lot of work whether anyone acknowledges it or not. I’ll do my best to pull out a few key threads, but we’re dealing with thousands of years here… so buckle up.

On one side of this confrontation we have the United States, founded in 1776, and the State of Israel, founded in 1948. In the sweep of human history, both of these nations are very, very young. Both were built on land where other people already lived. The existing populations were pushed out to make way for new arrivals who then set up a new kind of state. This is what historians mean when they say ‘settler colony’, which is not an insult but a description. It’s also, not incidentally, a description of Australia and a few other places we might recognise.

When a state is built via settler colonialism, the origin story of how it got started becomes incredibly important, because the whole thing depends on people continuing to believe it was legitimate. Because of this importance to maintaining the ‘status quo’ the origin story gets polished and protected.

We’re all familiar with America’s “land of the free and home of the brave” story, grounded in the stories of the Founding Fathers, the Constitution, and the idea that all men are created equal. In addition to being founding myths, each of those things are grounded in historical events. In Israel’s case, their origin story is often constructed around what is described as a biblical promise: a three-thousand-year-old religious text used by some to justify the legal and moral basis of a modern Zionist state. The claim isn’t just historical, it’s framed as prophecy, a story in which the state is presented as having been meant to be.

On the other side: Iran. This is where we need to slow down for a moment, because Iran is not like the other players in this story. Iran isn’t a country that has history. Iran is history, still walking around, still very much aware of itself. While some are busy constructing a past to stand on, Iran has been standing in its own for a few thousand years already.

We’re talking about the Persian civilisation and Cyrus the Great, who ruled in the sixth century BC, at roughly the same time that Confucius was shaping thought in China and the Buddha was teaching in India. While the foundations of the Roman Republic were being laid and Greek city-states were beginning to organise themselves, Persia was already operating as a vast, complex empire. The civilisation that absorbed the Islamic conquest of the seventh century and, rather than disappearing as many did, emerged again on the other side, with its identity intact.

Then came the Safavid rulers in the 1500s who made Shia Islam the state religion. This wasn’t simply a show of devout faith, it was also used as a deliberate political move to draw a clear line between Persia and the Sunni Ottoman empire next door. All this happened as the Ottomans were at the height of their power under Suleiman the Magnificent, while in Europe, the Protestant Reformation was tearing apart the Catholic Church, and rulers like Henry VIII were reshaping religion to consolidate their own authority.

Then we meet democratically elected leader Mohammed Mossadegh, removed in a British and American-backed coup in 1953 after attempting to nationalise Iran’s oil, a decision that still echoes in how Iran relates to the West today. This was happening at a time when colonial powers were losing control across Asia and Africa and newly independent nations were beginning to claim ownership over their own resources. For Britain, Iran wasn’t just about oil, it was about avoiding a precedent. If one country within their disintegrating empire could take control of its resources, others might do the same.

That moment doesn’t end there, it carries forward while continuing to shape what comes next. Decades later, the Revolution of 1979. These events may represent different centuries, different pressures and different systems, and yet the same civilisation consistently carries all of it forward. This history is all alive and all of it is part of the same continuous story.

There’s something else we need to understand and which sits in the background of all this. The version of Shia Islam that shapes the modern Iranian state includes a belief about the “end of days”. The tradition holds that a figure called the Twelfth Imam, who disappeared in the ninth century and is believed to exist in a kind of hidden state, will return and restore justice to the world. In many readings, the conditions for that return include the end of the State of Israel. This isn’t a fringe idea held by a handful of extremists. It sits within the founding beliefs of the Islamic Republic and informs how elements of its leadership interpret conflict and foreign policy.

Not everyone in this conflict is measuring success in the same way. Within the Iranian tradition, suffering and sacrifice can be understood as part of a longer trajectory where the end of the story matters more than the immediate outcome. If you ignore that, you're not actually understanding what you're looking at.

So what we have is this: two very young states, one of which grounds its legitimacy in an ancient text, squaring off against a living, continuous civilisation with its own long-standing narrative about how this ends. This is not a fair fight in historical terms. It looks like one on a map but it really isn’t.

Netanyahu understands this, whatever we might think of him. He’s a student of history and he knows exactly what Israel is up against. Whether he’s reading his own position correctly is a different question. There’s a real argument that Israel, and the political movement currently steering it, is overestimating what it holds. Claiming a three thousand year old prophecy of civilisation is not the same thing as having three thousand years of continuous civilisation. Iran has the latter. Israel has the former.

Iran has come through centuries of conquest, colonisation and external pressure without losing its sense of itself. That kind of resilience has a long memory.

This brings us to what I’m going to call the USI: the United States of Israel. Not a conspiracy, not a slur, just an honest description of what this alliance has become. It is a single bloc operating with a shared set of goals, where the line between American and Israeli interests has become nearly impossible to find. Decades of military funding, diplomatic protection and deeply aligned politics have produced something that functions, for all practical purposes, as one unit.

The USI is currently prepping for an increased bombing campaign, coupled with a possible military ground action against Iran. Leading the, quite one-sided American ground side of that effort is Pete Hegseth, the US Secretary of Defense, who, let’s face it, got his job primarily on ‘vibes’.

Hegseth moves through one of the most complicated and dangerous situations on earth with the energy of someone who has just unlocked a new level in a video game. He is frankly, woefully unqualified for the role he holds because despite how he seems to behave, foreign policy is not a game. He holds a position with decision making power that determines whether people live or die, and he shows neither the empathy nor the discernment that choices like these demand.

The president, meanwhile, seems only recently to have discovered that the Strait of Hormuz exists. Thanks to his decision to bomb Iran, we are all now suddenly aware of the importance of this narrow stretch of water at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, through which roughly a fifth of the world’s oil supply passes every single day. Having apparently also just learned that this waterway sits under Iranian control, his response has been to threaten a land invasion and to talk about bombing Iran “back into the stone age” (language more commonly directed at Palestinians by his allies in Israel). At this point, it might be worth asking the Iraqis for some relevant input, not about American invasions of their own country, but about something far more useful: what happened the last time someone actually tried to invade Iran by land?

Because in 1980, Saddam Hussein did exactly that. Not only did he chose to invade but he was armed and backed by the United States, both expecting a quick win against a revolutionary government that was barely holding itself together. What Saddam got instead, was eight years of war. Somewhere between half a million and a million people died on both sides, no real territory gained and a conflict that ended almost exactly where it started. Iran absorbed a full-scale land invasion from a well-equipped neighbour with superpower support behind it and it didn’t break. These events are not ancient history, either. It all began the year I was born and unfolded within the lifetimes of people reading this. It is simply, at least where Trump and Hegseth are concerned, unread and unexamined history.

This is what it looks like when the people in charge of making big calls affecting the rest of us are devoid of historical knowledge. It’s not just that they don’t know the facts; facts can be found. It’s that they never developed the framework to understand what these facts mean when applied to what is happening today.

You can tell someone that Iran is a civilisation with twenty-five centuries of continuous memory, that it has faced down empires far more powerful than anything currently pointed at it, and that it holds a deep, unshakeable sense of its own role in history. Without the context to receive that information, it just doesn’t compute. It’s a number and a name which exist inside a room they were never taught to enter.

Meanwhile, as all of this is unfolding, something quietly interesting is happening closer to home… a near-perfect illustration of exactly what we’ve been talking about.

Australia, much to the dismay of a growing majority of its citizens, has planted its flag firmly in the USI camp. The government moved quickly to publicly support the US–Israel position and, in doing so, has backed itself into a corner it can’t easily get out of. As the situation has escalated, Australia now finds itself on calls with dozens of other nations, trying to navigate a crisis it has very little influence over and even less room to manoeuvre.

This is hugely problematic because if the situation shifts, if Australia needs to quietly rebuild its relationship with Iran for trade or regional stability reasons, we no longer have the flexibility to do so without publicly walking back our own position. That’s the price of performative loyalty. You trade away your ability to adapt in exchange for being seen to stand on the “right” side, and then discover you can’t move when it matters.

The uncomfortable reality is that this will hurt Australia far more than it will hurt either the United States or Israel, neither of whom are particularly invested in how exposed that leaves us. Australia is, not incidentally, also a settler colony. We’re another young nation with our own complicated origin story and our own selective relationship with history. Draw your own conclusions.

Now of course, alliances matter. But perhaps understanding where we actually sit in the world matters more.

Thailand offers a useful contrast. It maintains relationships with the United States and Israel, but it hasn’t tethered itself exclusively to either. While both Israel and the US are involved in joint military and security training exercises with Thailand, the country doesn’t host permanent foreign military bases and its government remains focused, first and foremost, on Thailand. That gives it room to move so that when the situation shifts, it can quietly engage, negotiate and adjust without needing to perform loyalty or walk anything back.

Australia, on the other hand, has tied itself far more tightly to the USI bloc. Through intelligence sharing, defence agreements and the presence of joint facilities like Pine Gap, we have embedded ourselves in a system that leaves very little space for independence. When tensions escalate based on decisions made outside our control, we are not approaching the situation from a position of neutrality or flexibility, we are already buried in it up to our necks.

This has serious consequences because genuine diplomacy and national sovereignty both require room to move. They requires the ability to speak to multiple sides, to recalibrate, to respond to changing conditions. Thailand has preserved that ability while Australia has, to a large extent, traded it away.

Thailand’s move bought it something real, but it also requires ongoing discipline. It has to keep acting in line with the position it has taken, maintaining relationships without slipping into performative alignment or quiet contradiction. That’s a sophisticated place to be for a mid-sized country and requires a clear sense of where you sit, what you need and what your history has made you.

This isn’t an abstract argument about what schools should do differently. The people deciding whether we escalate this war in the Persian Gulf were educated somewhere. They sat in classrooms and they were taught history, or something called history, by teachers following a curriculum that people wrote and which governments signed off on.

Somewhere in that chain, the choice was made to teach history as a series of disconnected scenes rather than a continuous story. Instead of helping students see how everything fits together, we move from one moment to the next as if each stands alone. The result is that students leave school without ever really understanding that the world they’re inheriting isn’t new, but ancient and deeply interconnected.

The importance of the Strait of Hormuz is not a new fact. Iran’s depth and endurance as a civilisation is not a new fact. The end-of-days beliefs that shape how the Iranian state understands this conflict are not new facts. The track record of what happens when outside powers try to solve ancient conflicts by force is not a new fact. None of this is hidden. It’s just untaught, or taught in isolation, stripped of everything that make it meaningful.

We have the tools to do this differently. The frameworks exist and the educational and scientific research backs them up. What’s missing is the will to treat history as something that is still happening, to help students see, at every scale from their own family story to the global picture, where they are standing in the long human story.

There’s a story about Sir Edmund Hillary which comes to mind here. Several years back, he was invited to be the keynote speaker at a lunch for people who had done remarkable things in adventure and exploration. Once the doors were closed and the staff had left the room, Hillary reportedly stood at the lectern and told the gathered high-achievers to get over themselves.

Winning or being first, he told them, is not what most people end up remembering. Even when they do remember, it doesn’t mean what you think it means. None of us got to number one alone. We all got there because of everyone who was behind us: the people whose names aren’t on the plaques, whose faces aren’t in the photographs, whose work and sacrifice and knowledge made the whole thing possible. Tenzing Norgay stood on top of Everest at exactly the same moment Edmund Hillary did and yet history has been considerably less interested in remembering him.

As a species, we too seem to have forgotten this. We’ve forgotten how we got here. We’ve forgotten what was sacrificed by people we’ll never know, who built the world we walked into - the institutions, the agreements, the hard-won understanding of what happens when powerful nations decide that ancient, complex realities can simply be overridden by force. We inherited all of that and right now, we are watching a small group of people dismantle it in real time, congratulating themselves on standing on summits they didn’t build, surrounded by Sherpas they can’t name.

Until we change how we teach history, until we give people the skills to look at the entire thread and not just randomly selected scenes, we’ll keep producing leaders who discover the Strait of Hormuz in their sixties and think the right response is to bomb first and ask questions later. The ancient civilisations will keep doing what they have always done: waiting, watching and outlasting the people who thought they were the most important thing to happen in the last three thousand years of human existence.

They were not and they are not. A decent history education would have told them so.

Throughout my teens and twenties, Pauline Hanson and One Nation were, frankly, a joke. Not a harmless one mind you: the damage they did to public discourse and to communities of colour was real and serious. But politically? They weren’t improving anything.

They tended to rise whenever a crisis gave the media an excuse to dredge up familiar tropes of anti-immigration sentiment or resentment around Aboriginal rights. Then they faded again, consumed by internal chaos, fraud convictions and the kind of infighting that afflicts parties built around a single personality rather than around a coherent set of ideas.

They were easy to dismiss as noise and that was the mistake. We can now see that beneath it, slowly and patiently, an information architecture was being constructed to make a fringe platform look like common sense, ready to come into play the moment conditions shifted. Shifted, they now have.

This piece is about pulling that architecture apart. This is where the gap between perception and reality begins to matter.

As I started writing this piece, I had a moment where I wondered, given the current amplification of One Nation in the media, whether I had missed some kind of quiet renaissance. Maybe, at some point over the past thirty years, they had grown into a party with positions of real substance. Maybe I’d overlooked the bills they had been putting forward, or a shift toward something resembling a governing party.

I also found myself asking a different question. Where do most Australians actually sit on the issues One Nation opposes? When we lean in and take a closer look, many of those positions run directly against views held by a clear majority of us.

I’m not talking about the views of inner-city, latte-sipping crowds either, but those shared by broader samples of ordinary Australians from around the nation, measured and recorded consistently over years of independent polling.

Recently we’ve seen a surge in messaging as a narrative has taken hold, that seems to elevate One Nation as the party which speaks for the “everyday Aussie”. So I find myself wondering: which everyday Aussies, exactly? When we start to test that question against the data, the picture becomes clearer.

To begin with, let’s take an issue which dominated the previous election and resulted in a massive vote against The Liberal Party, resulting in the current ALP Government: climate change.

One Nation wants Australia out of the Paris Agreement, pledges to build new coal-fired power stations and sink further investment in nuclear energy. This also now comes at a time when severe weather events are becoming more frequent and disruptive across the country. Yet, they continue to position themselves as the only party willing to question the science, as though that alone is a virtue most Australians share.

Three quarters of Aussies - 75% of us - believe renewables should play a major role in our energy system by 2050. Four in five people support government investment in renewable energy technology. When asked directly about coal, only one third of voters support continued investment in it as an energy source.

One Nation doesn’t represent a silent majority waiting to be heard. In fact, the total opposite is true - it’s a loud minority backed by powerful economic interests. This raises the question: who benefits from a party pushing coal in 2026?

It’s not the families paying power bills and not the workers being promised jobs the market is already moving away from. It is definitely not our children who are growing up in a world where clean air is becoming harder to take for granted.

The people who benefit are those whose wealth remains tied to fossil fuel assets and to the policies that protect them.

That same pattern shows up elsewhere. In the current debates around multiculturalism and immigration, two different questions are being treated as one, and while they overlap, they are not the same.

Is multiculturalism good for Australia?
Nine in ten Australians say yes. The 2025 Scanlon Foundation survey puts the figure at 83%, a consistent finding across decades of research. One Nation’s entire founding project, the platform Hanson declared in 1996, was rooted in opposition to Asian immigration, and to multiculturalism as a concept. This goes beyond immigration to the deeper question of who belongs in our country and who does not.

On that foundational position, she has never had the majority of Australians with her. Not once.

Are current immigration levels too high?
Here, roughly half of Australians say yes, a level of concern which has risen sharply in recent years and which doesn’t come out of nowhere. Cost of living has crept into everything while housing feels increasingly out of reach, even for the fully-employed. For a growing majority of people, the pressure is constant and close to home, and immigration becomes one of the ways that pressure gets explained.

This concern doesn’t cancel out support for multiculturalism. For many Australians, both things are true at once, even if the public conversation rarely reflects that.

When Australians say they want lower numbers, they are usually talking about the number of people coming into the country each year. Most are thinking about the pressure this places on housing, wages and services, the everyday things that feel harder to manage right now.

When One Nation hears that, it doesn’t treat it as a housing or cost-of-living problem. Instead, they take a set of economic pressures - things that could be addressed through policy, planning and investment - and turn them into something else entirely. Something cultural and more corrosively, something identity-based.

The focus moves away from housing supply, wages and services, and toward immigration itself. They take the real economic pressures being felt by Australians and redirects the blame towards minorities, rather than where it should be directed - at the systems creating them.

That shift is not neutral, it’s the whole game. The 2023 referendum on the Aboriginal Voice to Parliament offers a clear example of how it plays out.

One Nation points to the “No” result as validation of its thirty-year campaign against measures addressing Indigenous inequality while the data and research tells a more complicated story.

Among those willing to express a view on constitutional recognition of First Peoples in principle, support for “Yes” outnumbered “No” by almost five to one. The “No” vote also did not signal a rejection of reconciliation, truth-telling, or Indigenous people having a say in decisions that affect them, all of which continue to be supported by around eight in ten Australians.

What it actually reflected was that in the absence of bipartisan support, many voters chose to prioritise the perceived risks of constitutional change over the possibility of better outcomes. That’s a fair distance away from standing in agreement with Hanson’s position.

The Voice campaign also offers a clear example of how consensus can be manufactured. Coverage was heavily weighted toward “No”, particularly across the Sky News ecosystem and Murdoch-aligned print media. According to the Murdoch Referendum Accountability Project, researchers analysed over 1,600 pieces of content about The Voice across The Australian, The Daily Telegraph, the Herald Sun, and Sky News. Across that coverage, over two-thirds of the published arguments, suggested that voters should oppose the Voice.

Most revealing was where that bias was coming from. It was not primarily driven by outside sources, such as “No” campaigners being quoted or given the platform to discuss their positions. Instead it was driven by News Corp voices themselves, all actively advocating for a “No” vote.

When researchers isolated just those journalists, columnists and presenters employed directly by NewsCorp, removing all independent contributors, “No” arguments made up 96% of words printed in their newspapers on the referendum.

Ninety-six percent is not simply reflecting public opinion. It is evidence of an organisation taking a position and consistently advancing it, with the help of vast resources unavailable to any other parties involved in the same debate.

Commentary, or opinion-based content, was found to present “No” arguments on four out of five occasions. At Sky News, 68% - over two-thirds - of scheduled time on air comprised of commentary, rather than reporting.

Across the newspapers, 43% of words came from News Corp’s own columnists, with a further 11% from outside op-ed contributors. This coalition of “No” writers meant that more than half of what was presented as ‘news coverage’ was in fact, opinion.

This right here, is the detail that matters most. The study found that even reporting of straight news events was often blended with commentary, making it extremely difficult for audiences to distinguish between fact and opinion in their news bulletins.

The official polling data from the referendum, available to anyone who went looking, of course told a far more nuanced story. However, the problem is that most people simply don’t go looking. They tend to trust what is put in front of them instead, because for most of their lives, that has felt like a reasonable thing to do.

I believe that it’s this that makes this moment different.

When coverage is this consistently weighted in one direction, it doesn’t just reflect public opinion but starts to drive and shape it. At that point, it becomes harder for all of us to tell where reporting ends and political campaigning begins. Step back from that for a moment, and a broader question starts to emerge.

Who, exactly, is One Nation speaking for?

On climate, One Nation sits to the right of two thirds of Australians. On multiculturalism, nine in ten. On Indigenous recognition, five to one.

Despite the clear disconnect, the polls show a surge. The media shows a groundswell and the narrative says the battlers have found their voice.

But I can’t help feeling that something just doesn’t add up.

If One Nation’s positions are this far removed from where most Australians sit, the question is no longer whether they represent ordinary Australians - the data has already shown that they don’t. The question is how that gap keeps getting papered over.

How does a party opposing what the majority of Australians believe, keep being presented as the majority’s champion?

That’s a media question and to answer it, we have to look at the environment in which those stories are being told.

In Australia, 95% of daily news revenue and around 70% of radio revenue is controlled by just four companies, with News Corp holding approximately 65% of media circulation. By some measures, Australia is second only to Brazil, for the highest concentration of media ownership in the world. This means that the range of voices and perspectives we are presented with is incredibly narrow.

The Australian has endorsed the right-wing Liberal Party at each of the past five federal elections. None of News Corp’s four daily metro papers have endorsed their opposition, Labor, since at least 2010. This is not a lean, nor is it a tendency. It is clear evidence of a pattern, and it shows up in how information is distributed across the country.

In 2018, Sky News began broadcasting free-to-air into regional Australia. By 2020 it was reaching 3.9 million unique viewers (a sixth of our population), growing its audience share by 38% in a single year. By 2024 it had delivered its highest ever regional audience share.

Before 2018, if you lived in regional Australia, your free-to-air news came from the ABC, Nine and Seven networks. From 2018 onwards, you had a new option at zero cost: a prime-time lineup of conservative opinion programming delivered nightly, directly to the communities most economically stressed and most likely to feel that mainstream politics had abandoned them.

The average Sky News viewer is 45 years old and their top concerns are cost of living and housing. These are not abstract issues but sit at the core of the daily realities facing the same communities where One Nation is surging.

The same channel. The same concerns. The same audience. The same political beneficiary.

Running alongside this expansion, was the systematic defunding of the broadcaster that had previously served those communities. The ABC lost more than $1.2 billion in real funding across a decade, through the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison Liberal governments, while also being expected to expand into streaming and digital platforms.

In 2018, the same year Sky News went regional, the Morrison government handed $40 million in public funding to Fox Sports, a Murdoch-owned company, through a sports broadcasting support program.

The ABC has a charter obligation to serve regional Australia. Only one broadcaster had that obligation and during successive Liberal governments, lost the funding to meet it. Conveniently, another organisation, privately owned by the same ideological project that had been lobbying against the ABC, was waiting in the wings to step in and fill the vacuum.

This is the American playbook. It is the exact same road taken by Fox News in rural American markets in the 1990s and 2000s: move into communities underserved by public media, fill the vacuum with grievance-driven content that points economic pain toward cultural enemies and watch the polling follow.

Australia is not immune to any of this. We are already living inside it and the research backs this up.

A peer-reviewed study analysing over 30 million news articles, from more than 200 Australian newspapers, found that News Corp’s ownership produced a marked conservative shift in coverage, with evidence of a coordinating influence on how ideas and issues were presented across its publications. In other words, when one part of the organisation moved in a particular ideological direction, the rest tended to move right along side it.

This conclusion is hard to ignore. When a small number of companies control most of the media, they also gain the ability to shape how stories are told, which voices are amplified and how the public comes to understand the world.

On climate reporting, that influence becomes even clearer. Around 45% of News Corp climate coverage expressed scepticism about the reality of climate change, while 65% of opinion pieces were sceptical of the credibility of climate science itself. This is the same organisation whose coverage helped position One Nation’s coal and Paris-exit positions as legitimate political debate, rather than as the increasingly fringe beliefs that most Australians already reject.

Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull described in his memoir, how News Corp worked closely with right-wing politicians to influence policy and elections. He wrote plainly that he had refused to run his government in partnership with the Murdochs, and they resented it and that tellingly, their coverage reflected that resentment.

A petition calling for a Royal Commission into News Corp’s influence, the largest e-petition in Australian parliamentary history, raised more than 500,000 signatures. The Senate inquiry that followed found Australia’s media regulation was not fit for purpose.

Since this finding, nothing has changed.

Once again we find ourselves wondering, who benefits?

News Corp’s shareholders benefit from a political environment that resists stronger climate regulation, because those regulations directly affect resource and energy profits. Gina Rinehart, a confirmed donor to One Nation and someone who has loaned her private jet to Hanson on multiple occasions (including during the South Australian election where it raised questions under state donation laws) benefits from that same environment.

This pattern also appears in debates around land and Indigenous rights. One Nation has consistently opposed measures that would give Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people a greater say over land use and decision-making. Those positions sit comfortably alongside industries that depend on access to land and resources, all of which benefit when that access faces fewer hurdles to jump over.

The interests align and the coverage follows the interests. Entrenching these interests further is the polling which follows the coverage accordingly.

Meanwhile, the people supposedly being served by all of this are the ones watching their rent rise, their climate become more unstable and their wages struggle to keep pace with the cost of living. If a political movement gains attention without delivering outcomes, influence without accountability and visibility without responsibility, we have to ask once again: who it is really for?

To see how this plays out in practice, it’s worth going back to where many of us first encountered it.

I was sixteen years old on September 10th 1996, when Pauline Hanson stood up in the Federal House of Representatives to deliver her maiden speech. I remember feeling appalled by it, even then. My memory is that MPs walked out, that both First Peoples and Migrant communities voiced outrage and the Prime Minister spoke of a “pall of censorship having been lifted”. I also remember the way it was covered on TV, like something seismic had happened and the way Hanson seemed to feed on every second of the attention.

She asserted that Australia was being “swamped by Asians” who formed ghettos and did not assimilate. She declared that mainstream Australians were “fed up” of being subject to reverse racism from those who promoted political correctness. Before the speech, there was no party organisation at all. After it, a new battle to define the Australian identity had begun.

It was not a policy document, but rather a performance of grievance. Hanson named enemies, she identified victims and she offered a story. What she did not offer, then or in the thirty years since, was a plan.

Within weeks, the Deputy Prime Minister and Trade Minister were warning that the race debate Hanson had ignited was putting Australian exports and jobs at risk. Ironically, the woman who claimed to speak for Australian workers had already threatened the trade relationships that employed them. The media meanwhile, largely continued reporting the speech, with minimal scrutiny of her claims. What little genuine analysis of Hanson’s words did come, came later. However for the most part, it simply never came at all.

Hanson has been in federal parliament for roughly fourteen years over the past three decades and she has even been in the position of holding the balance of power in our Senate. So how have ordinary Aussies benefitted from her presence in our parliament?

One Nation’s own website lists their achievements: helping one child with spinal muscular atrophy access treatment; blocking a cash transaction bill; passing a Senate motion against critical race theory in schools; some regional roads funding.

While the SMA case represents genuine advocacy for a real family, besides this, there is no housing legislation, no wages policy, no healthcare reform and no structural economic change of any kind.

The One Nation voting record tells an even fuller story. Almost without exception, Hanson has voted against increasing funding for public schools, against increasing support for childcare, against housing affordability measures, against renewable energy investment, and consistently for decreasing ABC and SBS funding.

This is the absolute kicker though: in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, Hanson opposed a bill to prevent price-gouging. The self-proclaimed champion of the battler voted against protecting ordinary Australians from being fleeced by our record-making supermarkets at the checkout.

In 2018, One Nation voted with the Coalition government 83% of the time and even more consistently at 86% when it involved driving policy which could have actually mattered to the people who supported them. The anti-establishment alternative, it turns out, has consistently voted in support of the establishment.

Her senate work attendance: 53%.

This is where it all comes into focus. The people most negatively affected by One Nation’s voting record are the ones most likely to support them. The communities whose schools Hanson has voted against funding, whose childcare she has voted against supporting, whose housing affordability she has voted against improving and whose wage protections she has voted against strengthening. These are the same communities supporting her now.

Meanwhile, Hanson’s Senate salary is $211,250 a year. She sold a Maitland investment property in 2023 for $1.1 million, more than double what she paid in 2012. She holds shareholdings in BCB Coal. She was in a relationship with a property developer and has travelled multiple times on Gina Rinehart’s private jet.

A climate sceptic with coal shares and a housing affordability opponent whose investment property has doubled in value, backed by Australia’s richest person, whose own wealth depends on the very energy policies One Nation promotes in the Senate.

The party of the battler.

The story was always in the details.

CODA: The Frog in the Water

Australians like to think of ourselves as straight-talking, see-through-the-bullshit types. It is one of our more cherished national myths.

Yet here is what the evidence in this piece actually shows. The media landscape most of us swim in, the one that tells us what is normal, what is debatable, who the elites are and who the battlers are, what the Voice referendum meant and whether climate change is really settled science, is controlled, to the tune of two thirds, by a single ideological project. The same project with a documented, century-long history of installing governments, defunding rivals and shaping public opinion in the service of its own interests.

This did not begin with Rupert.

Back in 1944, when Robert Menzies sought to create what became the Liberal Party, he gathered the most powerful press owners of the day (including Keith Murdoch, Rupert’s father) over dinner and obtained their blessing. The media were, in one historian’s words, godparents to the Liberal Party.

Rupert inherited that arrangement and scaled it globally. He launched Fox News in 1996, the same year Hanson gave her maiden speech, the same year the Howard government began defunding the ABC - same year, same playbook, different continents.

The machine claims to speak for the ordinary Australian against the elite but it defines elite in cultural terms - inner-city, progressive, cosmopolitan - rather than in terms of actual economic and political power. So the battler is told the enemy is the latte drinker, the academic, the ABC. We’re made to believe that it is not the mining billionaire, not the family dynasty and definitely not the interests that have been shaping Australian political outcomes since before most of us were born.

Most people trust the news. That’s not a flaw, it’s a habit built over time. However the reality is that what we are shown is always a partial view of a much more complex world. The average level of adult media literacy in Australia is very low compared to other countries. Older Australians who make up Sky News’s core audience are the least likely demographic to engage in fact-checking behaviours. This means that the people most exposed to the machine are the people least equipped to see how it functions. Meanwhile the budgets that might fund media literacy, public broadcasting and independent regional journalism are the same budgets that keep getting cut.

We like to think of ourselves as straight-talking, see-through-the-bullshit types. But we are also a country that has been, for a very long time, swimming in water that someone else has been slowly heating.

The danger with that kind of change is that it doesn’t feel like change at all. It just starts to feel normal.

The first step towards saving ourselves is noticing. The second is asking who turned up the heat, why, and what was gained by doing so.

This piece has tried to be a small contribution to that first step.

The rest is up to us.

Sources: Lowy Institute polling, Scanlon Foundation Social Cohesion Survey 2025, They Vote For You (theyvoteforyou.org.au), ABC Alumni funding analysis, International Journal of Communication, Murdoch Referendum Accountability Project, DemosAU polling January 2026, AFR/Redbridge polling February 2026, Queensland Court of Appeal judgment 2003, Senate Hansard, Independent Australia, The Conversation.

The media, predictably, fixated on “difficult”. It was the most personally biting response, directed at a strong woman who has a long and admirable record of publicly challenging power, and it lit up the cycle of outrage accordingly. Later, when pushed further on his response, rather than apologising, Albanese clarified that he had been referring to Grace Tame’s life, not her character. The news cycle raised its collective eyebrows and continued along its way.

There was something about this entire exchange however, that I just couldn’t stop thinking about.

Nobody seemed particularly interested in the other two responses.

The man currently facing multiple criminal convictions, who has repeatedly and openly undermined every democratic institution at home and many abroad, still gets the respect of being associated with “President”. Despite rarely behaving in a presidential manner, the full weight of the title was offered without hesitation or qualification.

Then there was the description of “Australia Day”, a date which carries profound grief and ongoing protest for a significant portion of this country’s population and our Prime Minister refers to it as “great”.

Just let that sit with you for a moment…

Interestingly, if you swap those last two answers around, if “difficult” goes to Australia Day and “great” goes to Grace Tame, you end up with something considerably more honest. Moreover, the fact that nobody seemed to notice that, including in much of the commentary coming from the so-called “progressive” media, tells us something important about whose discomfort we are conditioned to elevate and whose we are conditioned to sideline entirely.

What makes this harder to dismiss as a simple slip is what Grace Tame herself said in response. I’m not referring to the social media posts or the rejected apology that dominated the coverage, but this: that she doesn’t think Albanese is a bumbling misogynist. She believes he’s a savvy political operator who’s keen to appease Washington,.

Her response is worth sitting with, because if the person most directly affected isn’t reading this as careless misogyny but as something more calculated, it opens a different kind of question. Not just what the word “difficult” reveals about how we talk about women who challenge power, but whether the outrage cycle it generated was, on some level, useful. It makes it less plausible that a culture war moment landing in the week before International Women’s Day, with Australia’s commitment to an increasingly unpopular war sitting quietly in the background, was entirely accidental.

I’m not in a position to answer that. I haven’t done the background work to make that claim with any confidence. But inquiry asks us to at least notice the question; to look up from the loudest story in the room and ask what might be sitting in the quieter ones.

This kind of noticing, the capacity to look at the whole picture rather than the loudest detail, to stay with a question nobody else seems to be asking, has a name in education. We call it inquiry. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means that we seem to be retreating from it at precisely the moment we need it most.

There has been a lot of chatter in the education zeitgeist about inquiry learning lately and if I’m being completely honest, much of it has been driving me quietly insane.

To begin with, a lot of the commentary I’m hearing fundamentally misunderstands what inquiry learning actually is. Worse still, it risks dragging us backwards at precisely the moment we should be thinking much more seriously about how we prepare young people for the future. If I hear one more person, educator or otherwise, dismiss moments of deep curiosity by saying children are “just playing”, my frustration may just boil over.

Having said this, those comments reveal something important: they show just how poorly understood inquiry continues to be.

Parents often say they don’t really understand what inquiry learning looks like in practice and that’s fair enough. Schools haven’t always done a great job of explaining it. What worries me far more about this, is just how often the lack of clarity or genuine understanding comes from within the profession itself.

I’ve had countless conversations with leaders and teachers who’ve complained that EY classrooms let children “run around without purpose” or that “all those kids ever seem to do is play”. Anyone who has spent time watching young children learning through play-based inquiry knows how far from reality this perception is.

When I have had the opportunity to work with EY students, what I often saw in those spaces was something quite extraordinary. I’ve sat in discussions with five year olds as they workshopped concepts like belonging and community. I’ve worked with four year olds as they have created classroom agreements about how to be fair and inclusive. I’ve listened to six year olds making connections between stories, places and experiences in ways that many adults struggle to articulate.

Yet by the time many of those same students reached the upper primary years, something had changed. Their curiosity seemed quieter and questions more tentative. Their confidence in expressing themselves had faded. Faced with open inquiry, many appeared uncertain about how to begin.

For me, this raises an uncomfortable reality. The issue isn’t that inquiry learning doesn’t work. It’s that we often stop doing it properly, or that many of us were never given the skills or training to embed it well in the first place.

Inquiry asks young people to listen to their instincts while also learning to test them by putting them into action. It requires emotional engagement with ideas while still being able to reason thoughtfully and objectively. Children are asked to collaborate, debate and sometimes fail before arriving at deeper understanding, because failure, in this context, isn’t something to be avoided. It is a necessary part of the learning process itself.

Above all, inquiry learning helps us to build something far more valuable than the simple recall of content: it actively builds the ability to make a more informed judgement about how that content should, or could, be used.

Judgement, I’d argue, is a highly necessary civic skill just as much as it is an academic one. The way a child learns to question an idea in a classroom reflects the same capacity they’ll later draw upon as an adult when encountering a misleading headline, a carefully worded non-apology or a national story that conveniently leaves certain people out.

Inquiry trains us to notice what doesn’t quite add up. It asks us to step back and look at the whole picture, not just the detail that’s loudest or most familiar. It invites us to consider whose story is being centred and whose is being quietly set aside.

These are exactly the kinds of questions much of the commentary around Albanese’s word associations failed to ask.

The focus on “difficult” made sense on one level. It was the most immediately personal, and Grace Tame’s experience of being publicly diminished is real and worth taking seriously. But by fixating on that single word, much of the commentary missed the more systemic pattern sitting just beneath it. The unquestioned deference to power. The breezy comfort with a date that represents something very different depending on whose history you’re standing in.

That’s not a criticism of anyone in particular. It’s an illustration of how difficult it is to see the whole picture when we haven’t been taught to look for it.

This is what inquiry education actually does, when it’s done well. It doesn’t just teach children to find answers. It also teaches them to notice which questions aren’t being asked.

Yet despite this, the pushback against inquiry in education is growing. It sits alongside a broader cultural shift back towards compliance, standardisation and control. Alongside systems that feel familiar, that are easy to measure and that reward the right answer over the more interesting, and often messier, question. Complexity gets flattened. Nuance gets lost. The uncomfortable edges of a story get smoothed over in favour of something simpler and easier to digest.

Inquiry does the opposite of these things and I think that’s precisely why it makes so many people feel uncomfortable. The reality is, once we start asking deeper questions, we begin seeing things differently and in ways we often can’t easily unsee.

The schools where I have seen inquiry genuinely thrive tend to share one thing: leadership without ego. Teams who remain curious, who work collaboratively and who see their own learning as part of the process are far more successful at creating safe, experimental spaces where inquiry can take hold. In those environments, teachers (as well as students) become more engaged rather than less. Inquiry becomes something lived, not something written into a policy document.

That kind of culture cannot be sustained by a handful of enthusiastic educators. It has to be modelled across the whole school, starting from the top. Children are not only paying attention to what we teach them. They are watching how we behave when things become complicated.

They notice whether we acknowledge when we get something wrong, or whether we reframe and move on. Whether we can sit with discomfort, or whether we smooth it over. Whether accountability is something we each model, or something we only expect of them.

We tell children that saying sorry is a sign of strength. That recognising when we are wrong is part of being human. That repair matters. Then they watch the Prime Minister of their country choose a careful clarification over a genuine reckoning, and the lesson they absorb isn’t the one we wrote in the curriculum document.

Systems learn from leadership. Patterns repeat.

If we want young people who can recognise misleading framing, who can look at three word associations and notice that two of them passed with far less scrutiny than they deserved, then we cannot ask them to practise those skills only in ways that leave the centre undisturbed.

We cannot invite curiosity while quietly deciding which questions are allowed to be asked.

Inquiry, at its best, creates the conditions for exactly the kind of thinking this moment demands. It’s not limited to classrooms alone, but has genuine application in the communities, institutions and public conversations that classrooms are quietly preparing our young people to shape.

If we want something different for the next generation, we cannot simply tell them what matters. We have to show them how to find and create that meaning for themselves.

I believe that begins with how we choose to learn, how we choose to listen and how we choose to respond when the stories we tell ourselves no longer hold.

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Yet for me, the existence of the day itself carries an uncomfortable truth. I just can’t help thinking that, in a truly equal society, we probably wouldn’t need a day like this one. The fact that we do suggests there is still something seriously unfinished about the story we tell ourselves about the role of women.

I’m starting to think one of our defining characteristics as a nation is the number of unfinished stories we still haven’t found endings for.

Australians are very good at telling ourselves stories about fairness. We like to think of ours as a country where people can get a “fair go”, where injustices are eventually corrected and where ordinary people can speak up when something isn’t right. It’s a powerful and aspirational national narrative. It’s also one we repeat often enough that we sometimes forget to stop and ask whether it is always true.

Lately I’ve found myself noticing the small moments where that story begins to fray.

Some stories, it would seem, are much harder to finish than others.

The music industry provides a clear and public example of inequality between men and women. Australian artists like Missy Higgins and Courtney Barnett have often commented on the different expectations female musicians face in interviews. Women are frequently asked questions about their appearance, which designers they are wearing, how they manage to balance family life with their careers, or whether motherhood will change their music. Male artists are far less likely to be asked any of those questions.

Watch enough interviews and you’ll see that a pattern begins to appear.

I was reminded of this again a few days ago, as I watched a documentary about the Lilith Fair music festival in the United States. At one point, the singer Jewel recalled an interview she gave when she was just breaking onto the music scene as a teenager. Instead of asking about her music, her inspirations or aspirations, the interviewer asked her how she managed to perform oral sex with her crooked teeth.

She was nineteen.

As I watched the original clip of her uncomfortably laughing the question off, I thought about how unlikely it would be to see a teenage male musician being asked a similar kind of question on national television. Yet stories like Jewel’s weren’t presented as shocking anomalies in an otherwise professional workplace. They were simply part of the constant background noise of being a woman in that industry.

Most women recognise that noise immediately.

Earlier this week I watched a video of the singer Chappell Roan standing outside a restaurant, phone in hand, filming a group of paparazzi who refused to leave her alone. She asks them calmly and politely to give her some privacy. They continually laugh and insist they aren’t bothering her while refusing to give her the space she asks for.

There was something deeply uncomfortable about the moment for me. It isn’t just that the paparazzi are all men. It’s the way her “no” carries no weight at all, as if these men believe they’re entitled to ignore it because they believe she owes them something simply for being an artist.

From the earliest years in school we teach children a simple rule: when someone says no, you stop. It’s one of the first lessons about consent and respect that we try to give young people.

Yet somewhere between the classroom and adulthood that rule seems to become strangely negotiable. A woman can ask to be left alone or given space and be completely ignored. A woman can say “no” and still be questioned about her behaviour or intentions. A woman can speak up about a wrong perpetrated against her and suddenly find herself becoming the problem.

Once you start noticing the pattern, it becomes surprisingly difficult to unsee.

For years I was proud of the fact that I was “one of the boys”. I took it as a compliment. It meant I could move easily in spaces that weren’t always welcoming to women. I liked sport, I enjoyed drinking beer and I was comfortable around male banter.

Looking back now though, I’m wondering if that pride was something else entirely. Maybe it was just a survival instinct.

Because being “one of the boys” often comes with an unspoken set of conditions. You don’t take things too seriously. You laugh things off which maybe you shouldn’t. You ignore comments that would make you uncomfortable if you paused long enough to really think about them.

Years later, watching how stories about women unfold in the media, I sometimes think back to moments like that. The pattern, once again, feels familiar.

I remember one teenage experience vividly.

I was about fourteen or fifteen years old, waiting with a friend to sing the national anthem at a baseball double-header in Altona. She was younger than me, maybe thirteen, and a cancer survivor. I was the sibling of one. We’d been invited as representatives of a charity which supported teenagers living with cancer.

Standing nearby were several players from an AFL football club who were there for a promotional appearance. One of the most famous players in the group began making comments about our bodies and quickly a few of his team mates jumped in. Asking us to show them our legs. Asking how old we were. Asking what we were doing after the game.

We were just girls.

I remember giving them a look. You know the one. The look that many teenage girls learn to give when they don’t feel safe enough to say anything but want to show they’re not impressed.

Unsurprisingly, it changed absolutely nothing. No one intervened. The moment simply passed as we were called out to sing on the mound and the event carried on as if it hadn’t even happened.

Girls deal with moments like that all the time. The comments often begin around the moment our bodies start to change. Sexualisation arrives early and quietly becomes something we are simply expected to tolerate.

Later, when women speak about these experiences, the reaction can be surprisingly defensive. Men often respond by talking about how difficult things have become for their gender. I genuinely empathise, many of those struggles are real.

But it also overlooks a basic truth: most of the systems shaping those struggles were built by and for men in the first place.

Women must also live within these systems. Systems we have never had much power to influence. Women played little to no role in the design of the systems governing society, yet we live with their consequences every day.

You can see this tension clearly in the recent reaction to ’s retort to the Prime Minister, after he described her as “difficult” at a press conference. Tame became widely known after speaking publicly about the sexual abuse she experienced as a child. Her brave advocacy helped change laws that once prevented survivors from telling their own stories. She was made Australian of the Year.

In many ways she represents exactly the kind of courage we claim to admire in a leader.

Yet the public conversation around her rarely stays focused on the issues she represents for long. Instead it shifts focus to her tone of voice, her attitude, whether she is being too confrontational or too disrespectful towards political leaders.

Once more, the pattern is familiar.

When a woman raises an uncomfortable truth about power or violence, within days if not hours, the public conversation becomes about the woman herself rather than the issue she has raised.

For anyone who doubts how familiar this pattern is in Australia, it’s worth remembering the treatment of Julia Gillard during her time as Prime Minister. For years she was judged on her appearance, her voice and her decision not to have children rather than on her leadership. Some of the same voices now express outrage and accuse Grace Tame of being disrespectful. Tame’s response captured what many women were thinking: “Spare me the condescension, old man.”

What makes the pattern difficult to talk about is that none of these moments, taken on their own, seem especially dramatic. A strange interview question. A group of paparazzi refusing to leave someone alone. A crude comment made to teenage girls at a sporting event. A political figure being described as “difficult” for speaking plainly.

Each moment can be dismissed in isolation.

Taken together, they begin to tell a different story.

The same dynamic appears when stories about sexual violence move through the justice system.

Take the case involving Tom Silvagni. When the suppression order around the case was lifted, much of the media coverage expanded quickly beyond the crime itself. The focus turned toward the Silvagni family name, the football dynasty and the reputational damage surrounding a well-known sporting lineage. The woman at the centre of the case largely disappeared from the narrative.

But there was another, easy-to-miss detail in the coverage. While much of the commentary focused on the reaction of the family, especially the response of his mother, Jo Silvagni, relatively little attention fell on Tom’s famous footballer father, Stephen Silvagni, himself.

It’s a small shift, but it reveals something interesting about how blame and scrutiny are often distributed. Instead of remaining centred on the violence or the perpetrator, the narrative drifts toward the behaviour of the women surrounding the situation. Suddenly the tension appears to sit between a grieving mother and a silent assault victim. The focus moves sideways and once again, the man at the centre of the case becomes slightly less visible.

Institutions are often very good at protecting themselves and those within them when it suits them. When reputations are at stake, narratives often have a way of being told gently enough to keep the centre of gravity somewhere safer. Even beyond this though, there is another layer to the conversation about gender that makes the idea of equality even harder to defend.

First Peoples women continue to experience violence at far higher rates than any other group of women in Australia. They are also far more likely to encounter the justice system and far more likely to have their children removed into state care. Once again, women find themselves at the sharpest edge of an unfinished national story.

While governments speak about reconciliation and truth telling, policies continue to be introduced that critics argue disproportionately affect Aboriginal women and children. In Victoria, debate over recent bail law changes unfolded alongside the state’s ongoing treaty process. The reforms came only a short time after the death in custody of Veronica Nelson, an Aboriginal woman whose case had already raised serious concerns about the treatment of First Peoples held on remand.

During parliamentary debate, critics including the leader of the Victorian Greens argued the new laws could increase the number of First Peoples people, particularly women, being held in custody before trial. At the same time, the findings of the Yoorrook Justice Commission continue to highlight how deeply colonial systems still shape the relationship between Aboriginal communities and the justice system.

If women already struggle to be believed, the barriers facing First Peoples women are often even higher. A society that struggles to hear women in general will struggle even more to hear the voices of the women who sit furthest from power.

The pattern does not stop at the edges of society. It reaches right into the centre of political life.

In recent years Australia has seen multiple scandals involving the treatment of women within the walls of Parliament itself. Allegations of sexual assault and harassment surfaced from inside the very institutions responsible for writing the laws meant to protect citizens.

If women can struggle to be believed even when speaking about events inside the nation’s highest democratic institution, what does that say about the chances of being heard elsewhere?

Beyond Australia, the pattern becomes even more confronting. The global response to the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein showed just how long powerful men can operate with impunity while the testimonies of women and girls are dismissed, delayed or quietly buried.

What concerns me most about all this is that when systems repeatedly fail to listen, the signal travels far beyond the courtroom or the newsroom.

Our girls are watching.

They are learning what happens when women speak up. They are learning whose voices carry weight and whose are questioned. They are learning how to deflect attention they never asked for.

It’s worth pausing to pose a question here, especially to the men reading this.

Imagine your daughter, niece or granddaughter at ten or twelve years old. Or fourteen. Or even nineteen. Imagine her beginning to experience the same kinds of comments, assumptions and dismissals that so many women describe.

Imagine her learning that speaking up will often be met with doubt or ridicule.

Would you be comfortable with that for her?

Because for many girls, that is exactly when it begins.

Perhaps the most telling sign that the story isn’t finished yet is how familiar these conversations feel. Women speak, we report violence, we continue to challenge the systems around us. The response is often doubt, distraction or silence.

Girls are watching this play out in real time. They are learning what happens when women speak up and whose voices are believed when they do.

Which brings us back to the story we like to tell ourselves about fairness. Until women can speak about violence, inequality and power without having their credibility immediately questioned, that story remains unfinished.

International Women’s Day will continue to exist for the same reason.

Not simply to celebrate women, but to remind us that the ending still hasn’t been written.

The first bird I really remember noticing was a pigeon.

He was not at all elegant. Just a crooked-legged Bangkok pigeon who treated my balcony like a private members club. I don’t even like pigeons, but I loved seeing him each time he turned up. He had this sideways hop that made him look permanently unimpressed, like he’d survived something dramatic but wasn’t interested in staying to chat about it.

There are always dozens of pigeons around this city, all equally noisy and unwelcome, but this one caught my attention because of one foot. It had clearly been broken at some point and healed badly, so he permanently looked like a ballet dancer about to plié. Because of it, he moved differently from the other birds. After months of watching him, he felt like a familiar friend. Of course I tried to memorialise him with a photo.

Every time I tried to photograph him though, he’d catch me mid-sneak, give me a deeply suspicious side-eye and fly off in protest. It became our thing, a little game where I pretended not to care while he absolutely refused to cooperate. For years it was Pigeon 1, Birg 0.

Then during Covid, when our lives in Bangkok shrank to condo walls and online classrooms, I finally managed to get the shot. I hid behind my bedroom curtains like a low-rent paparazzo and snapped him before he noticed. When I succeeded, I actually cheered, then laughed at myself for behaving like I’d achieved something deeply significant…

I was so proud I even had his image printed on a face mask!

I still don’t like pigeons. I spent much of that year engaged in what my Grade 6 students and I named “The Pigeon Wars,” as we brainstormed ways to discourage the birds from settling on my balcony. But I had noticed him and noticing, I now think, marked the beginning of something.

The entire Covid season was about confinement. Throughout it, we all had to learn how to survive in weirdly separate conditions while finding the humour in small victories.

Around the same time that this was happening, my mum was diagnosed with a very aggressive cancer. When she died soon afterwards, I was stuck in Thailand and travel restrictions meant I couldn’t get home. It gave that entire period a strange suspended quality, as if life were happening somewhere slightly out of my reach.

One year later, travel restrictions had been lifted and I had finally made it home so we could lay her to rest. On the anniversary of her death, I walked along the Mordialloc Pier in Port Phillip Bay - one of the many bayside areas where mum had enjoyed running throughout her life. Being July, the sky was stormy and the bay was restless, the slate blue waves rolling under the heavy clouds. I hadn’t gone there looking for symbolism really. I just felt the need to be by the sea.

From the moment I stepped onto the creaky boardwalk, a tiny sparrow appeared.

At first I barely noticed it, but then I realised that it was keeping pace with me. It would hop up onto the top railing and tilt its head, looking at me quizzically, then drop down to the lower beam and hop around in quick impatient bursts before flying a few metres ahead and landing again to wait and watch as I slowly walked towards it.

When I caught up, it would do the whole thing again.

Up. Down. Forward. Pause. Stare.

Then off again.

After a while it felt less like a coincidence and more like supervision. It was like a tiny, feathered sergeant escorting me down the length of the pier. Or, if I’m honest, a bit like a mother hurrying a distracted child along.

Now I don’t speak sparrow, so I can’t tell you what it was doing. All I know is that it stayed with me the entire length of that pier, flying ahead and circling back, until I stepped off at the end. Then it lifted once more and simply disappeared.

It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t mystical.

But the moment stayed with me.

Then this past January, I met a bold little kookaburra in Somers while I was staying with my two best friends. He had been flying around erratically for the better part of an hour, darting between fence posts and branches like he had somewhere urgent to be and nowhere in particular at the same time. We’d noticed as we finished breakfast and came outside to relax because he’d settled on the fence nearby and had fixed his attention on us.

I decided to walk over slowly, half expecting him to take off. Instead he stayed firmly rooted to his perch. I lifted my phone and took a photo. Still there. We looked at each other properly, eye to eye, which felt faintly ridiculous and strangely grounding all at once.

I can’t tell you whether the kookaburra’s behaviour was about playing, or if he was posturing or signalling something to his family group. What I can tell you is that being able to stand so close to this iconic Australian bird was a moment which felt significant - like it was saying something I needed to pay attention to.

I walked back to my friends laughing at myself for taking it so seriously. There was nothing mystical about it. Just a bird doing some slightly-crazy bird things. Yet it felt different from the earlier encounters.

The pigeon had belonged to confinement. The sparrow had kept quiet company through grief. The kookaburra felt steadier, less like it was just passing through, more simply being present.

When I look back now, I can see that these birds marked seasons in my life.

Across many Indigenous knowledge systems, learning doesn’t move in straight lines. It spirals so that you return to the same landscapes in different phases of your life and they reveal something new with each visit. Birds are an integral part of this rhythm as they arrive, they depart and inevitably, they return.

Birds migrate, but they never move through landscapes lightly. As they travel they scatter seeds, pollinate plants and become part of food chains in places that are not their permanent homes. Even in passing they impact the systems which they move through, leaving traces of their presence behind them.

I believe that we humans do something similar. We arrive in places for seasons, sometimes for years, sometimes for generations and whether we intend to or not, we change the environments which we inhabit. Each one of us shapes them and they shape each of us in return.

I have lived what feels like a migratory life. Born in Africa. Grown and shaped by Australia. Found adventure in London. Choose a new story in Thailand. For a long time I’ve thought of that movement as freedom. Now I am starting to see that it is something more layered. Movement shapes us, but it also asks something of each of us.

Lately, I have been really asking myself what it means to be Australian. I wasn’t born there and I don’t live there now, yet it is the nationality I proudly carry. This question keeps resurfacing in my writing about belonging and about who matters, though I’m realising that the answer feels different when I am overseas compared to when I am at home.

While it is undoubtedly a question steeped in politics, the version of it I am sitting with right now feels quieter than that. It feels more seasonal.

Australia is, after all, a nation shaped by movement and migration. Generations of people arriving, leaving, returning and adapting. For most of us, the story of our lives is not one of staying still but of moving through places and phases that gradually shape who we become. Like birds migrating across landscapes, we rarely pass through a place without leaving something behind or carrying something with us when we go.

At the moment the public conversation in Australia feels increasingly anxious about migration, as if movement itself were something suspicious. Yet when I look at my own life, and the lives of most people I know, movement is precisely how we’ve learned who we are. Each place asks something different of us and each season shifts our understanding of what it means to belong.

When I think about the spiral of the last several years, the symbol that keeps returning to me is the feather. This is not because it promises flight or freedom, but because it marks passage. A feather is evidence that something has moved through. It asks us to notice that something has lifted, shifted and even changed direction.

When I reflect on it all, that is what I believe these birds have been quietly marking for me. The pigeon during the strange confinement of Covid. The sparrow keeping me company on the pier during a season of grief. The kookaburra this year, holding its ground and meeting my gaze as if to remind me that sometimes the work is simply to stay present.

They were never instructing me, they were simply present. The difference now is that I am noticing them.

The most interesting thing that happens when we begin paying attention like this, is that it becomes harder to ignore the small signals that tell us a season is shifting. One bird lands where you don’t expect it. Another lingers longer than usual. A third turns up just as you realise that life has quietly moved you into a different phase.

I don’t know what the next bird will be, but I have a feeling that when it arrives, I’ll recognise it not as prophecy or message, but as orientation.

A small sign that my spiral has turned again.

Author’s note

This reflection is part of my own documentation journey within the Learning Pioneers Spiral of Inquiry, which the LPs Advocacy Team is currently exploring alongside Judy Halbert and Linda Kaser. Their work, particularly in Leading Through Spirals of Inquiry, draws deeply on First Nations ways of learning and knowing, including the idea that understanding unfolds through cycles of noticing, reflection and return.

As I move through the early stages of the spiral, I’ve been paying attention to what keeps showing up in my own life and thinking. This piece sits in that scanning phase. Other reflections will follow as the inquiry continues and the spiral turns toward the next stages of learning.