The early nineties look like the inside of so many different nightclubs. I walk around with a faint taste in my mouth that is salty and sharp like acid. The sound of fast cars ringing in my ears, floating half the time like there's two metres of rose coloured neon tinted glass between me and the rest of the world.
— The Casuals
Surfing runs a line through our lives here, direct, indirect, subliminal, there are points of convergence everywhere, ways which won’t leave you alone even when you want them to, infused, ground in, that’s how it is when you live here. The tide of these things washes over us. But I didn’t always think this way.
– ‘Don’t You Know You Got Legs: A Gold Coast Surf Culture Manifesto’ in Lines to the Horizon
The Gold Coast: Sun-Drenched Sin City That Wants to Shine
The Guardian London
In an essay commissioned by the Guardian London prior to the 2018 Commonwealth Games the author reflects on social, cultural and architectural expansion of her hometown of the Gold Coast and its reputation in the national and international imagination.
“Cities have moods and boroughs, and things only locals know. They are at their best when they surprise; when you sink in to the city and relate to it on its own terms. The Gold Coast has been allowed to be trashy, glitzy and even obscene, as long as it doesn’t gatecrash the VIP party – one smoky quartz slipper already dangerously close to the rope. In any case, this won’t be the city’s last renaissance.”
Love Hurts
The Conversation
Love Hurts critiques the often perceived divide between art and sport by highlighting the socio-political connections between sports fandom and a literary life. The essay focuses on former world number 1 tennis player Lleyton Hewitt, controversial rising star Nick Kyrigos and the author’s journey as a writer and academic.
“I watched Lleyton’s US Open victory in 2001 alone. The match started at 3am Australian time and ended at 9.15am when a big serving Pete Sampras was summarily dispatched. At 8.15am I rang my boss and said I’m not coming in until he wins. He said who? I said Lleyton Hewitt and then I hung up. I nearly lost my job that day but my boss let it go. I wanted him to fire me. A Gold Coast businessman riding on the coat tails of a Howard government-sponsored sell out of welfare – I spent most of the day taking resumes off people the company rolled through the database tubes like stale bread rolls.”
In a critique of the enduring power of canonical literature the author critiques the dominant ideology of male centric literary criticism by combining an analysis of Milton’s Paradise Lost with an examination of a life lived at the top of a tower on Australia’s version of paradise – the Gold Coast.
— ‘The Hanging Garden’ in The Griffith Review
The 90s: Why You Had to Be There
The Conversation
A review essay, this work highlights the DIY aesthetic of the grunge era and its significant contribution to culture in a pre-911 pre-internet explosion world.
“Van Gogh shot himself in a wheat field. Kurt Cobain in a greenhouse. Van Gogh took two days to die. Cobain’s shot was more effective.”
Desert Field of Dreams
Griffith Review
In an extended essay on labour conditions in the UAE the author critiques the exploitative and murderous practices undertaken to produce the ambitious levels of architectural innovation and vision in Dubai. The essay examines the implicit involvement of The West in Dubai’s rampant expansion and the social, environmental and cultural consequences.