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- Published 20250204
- ISBN: 978-1-923213-04-3
- Extent: 196 pp
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Staying faithful to Earth
Non-fictionIt is a startlingly new discovery that there are more planets than stars in our galaxy. Even if early astronomers (like Kepler) intuited that other suns must have planets, we didn’t have definitive proof until very recently that our solar system is not unique in consisting of planets orbiting a star. The first exoplanet was confirmed in 1992; the first exoplanet around a star similar to our sun was discovered in 1995. The latest count is over 5,000 and growing. Discoveries have stacked up so fast that astronomers and astrophysicists who used to know each individual exoplanet by name now say it’s impossible to keep track of those that exist in just one small part of the Milky Way, with thousands more expected to be found in the coming years.
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Home is a long way away
Non-fictionThe Australian housing market is a wealth-generating machine, not a home-generating machine. So much is wrong with the current situation. No doubt you see it too; everybody seems to on some level. That’s why we keep hearing about the ‘Australian housing crisis’. I can see it, and I proudly consider myself an old-school capitalist, with a preference for free enterprise, fair competition, private property rights and the chance to make an occasional profit. We now find ourselves with a de facto caste system in Australia: the home owners relative to the home renters. Both groups need homes, but there is a marked wealth division between those collecting passive income on houses they own and those living solely on direct income who are forever chasing a rising market.
Interstitial
Non-fictionAmerican sociologists John and Ruth Hill Useem first coined the term ‘third culture kid’ in the 1950s to describe the experience of Americans who were raised abroad in a culture different to their birth culture. This term reflects the way children raised overseas straddle three cultures: the culture of their birth, the culture within which they are raised, and a third, nebulous culture – the culture they create through the way they learn to relate to each other. The third culture is interstitial, not an amalgam. ‘Third culture kid’ (TCK) is a term often used as shorthand. Many TCKs will have experienced more than one cultural shift too. Those with diplomatic, military or missionary families are often raised in multiple countries, and others, like me, will continue their travels overseas as adults too, exercising the global and economic mobility they know well.
Shelf life
Non-fictionEarly in his career, Charles Dickens notably underestimated the reputational risk of library-shelf browsing when he invited the critic George Henry Lewes home for tea. Over steaming cups, Lewes eyed naff triple-decker novels and bland travel books, ‘all obviously the presentation copies from authors and publishers’. He recalled the experience in a waspish elegy published shortly after Dickens’ death: ‘A man’s library expresses much of his hidden life, I did not expect to find a bookworm, nor even a student, in the marvellous “Boz” but nevertheless this collection of books was a shock.’
