Featured in
- Published 20230801
- ISBN: 978-1-922212-86-3
- Extent: 200pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook

Glory to God for long weekends,
for lattes served by obsequious baristas,
sunnied eggs and bacon with the crispy ends,
for an empty park in front of the cinemas.
To she which gives us rain on shaggy lawns,
all glory given, by which we fail to set
the alarm, through sports drop-offs at dawn,
for hungover Saturdays, Fridays without regret.
Glory, glory to unexpected football
games telecast on free-to-air, for heirs
who suddenly decide to wash the car, for all
enlightenments filling each sudoku’s squares.
For golf, for ambling promenades, we praise
Her who gave weekends to punctuate our days.
Share article
More from author
The future
PoetryFor a moment he was given his future: a prophetic pulse racing to the horizon of his life and washing it stark and certain, the glacier of...
More from this edition
Hump day
Fiction‘Well, I’m sure all your questions will be answered very soon. Genius Inc. is holding a press conference at 3 pm,’ Sam says. ‘The Prime Minister will be there too, since the government is partly funding them now, after their cancer discovery. It’s serious, Prue. Try to have an open mind, alright? Keep your phone close. I’ll call you straight after.’ ‘Sure,’ she yells after him, ‘if we survive it.’
Upping the ante
Non-fictionAs it turned out, Centrebet’s move online – coupled with the many other betting innovations it pioneered – led exactly to where Daffy hoped it would: a prodigious pot of gold. He says the company went from taking ‘fifty or sixty bets in one day’ to taking ‘five or 600,000 bets on a Saturday night from all over the world’. By the turn of the millennium, its annual turnover was in excess of $100 million and it had become – in the words of Piers Morgan, its then general manager – ‘one of the leading sports betting organisations in Australia, if not the world’.
Virtue signals
Non-fictionThe sheer speed and volume at which data is processed, coupled with popular imaginings of the infallibility of machines, means that predictions produced by such processes are imbued with the aura of objectivity. As a result, hard decisions – acting in contexts of radical uncertainty, and having to determine winners and losers – become easy ones based on limited considerations directed towards improving the lot of as many individuals as possible while doing least harm. In other words, big data transforms the need to act politically into the possibility of acting only technically.