If, like me, you rolled out of bed on Boxing Day with a ham hangover and fell into a pile of wrapping paper and gifts that you don’t want, then I may have a solution for you: regifting. Regifting is basically a type of recycling. To regift, if you’d like the Merriam-Webster dictionary definition, is…
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There are a couple of phrases that are guaranteed to disturb; subjects steeped in so much stigma that, once raised, make most people uncomfortable and nervous. When I see a cute baby I will, without fail, gurgle ‘ermahgawd I want one’, successfully disturbing my parents. If it’s an unusually cute baby I’ll hug myself and…
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Three years ago, I travelled to England in search of Jane Austen. I‘d been a tragic Janeite for a long time. I could tell you exactly what Captain Wentworth wrote in his letter to Anne in Persuasion and recite the first few pages of Pride and Prejudice. Even as I write, my Jane Austen doll,…
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In Martin Amis’s novel The Rachel Papers the protagonist Charles Highway says that twenty is the real turning point in life. The oft-celebrated milestones of eighteen and twenty-one are unimportant. In his opinion, twenty ‘may not be the start of maturity but, in all conscience, it’s the end of youth.’ At twenty you like to…
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For the whole of my long childhood, I had a nanny. Someone to pick me up after school, drive me to clarinet, make sure I had a nutritious afternoon snack, and entertain me until Mum and Dad traipsed home.When I was young I thought everyone was like me. Everyone had two working parents – and…
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I have a confession, dear reader. I have been sleeping around. In fact, I have been at it from an early age. I have been far from faithful I am a promiscuous reader, and I love then leave the books I read. I tease a book, thumb through the first few chapters, dog-ear pages,…
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Like most people looking to crack into the writing/publishing world, I have a number of unpaid jobs. I list them as internships on my CV to make them sound a little more impressive but really I’m just an unpaid office monkey who prints things out, writes post-it notes and makes figurines out of paper clips….
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Thousands and thousands of years ago, before texting and online dating, a group of men were waxing philosophical on the nature of love and relationships. One by one, aided by that age-old social lubricant, wine, they took to their soapboxes to praise Eros, the god of Love. Plato recounts this B.C. booze-up in his famous…
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Next week, on Tuesday 16 April 2013, the winner of the inaugural Stella Prize, the award that celebrates women’s contribution to Australian literature, will be announced. The shortlist is as follows: The Burial by Courtney Collins (Allen & Unwin) Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser (Allen & Unwin) The Sunlit Zone by Lisa Jacobson…
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‘You’re writing your memoirs? But you’re young, what do you have to write about?’ This is the question I have been facing on a regular basis since I started writing my memoirs as part of my honours degree. Writing my memoirs… It seems strange and a little grandiose to say that. I feel as though…
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When I was twelve, the thing I wanted more than anything else in the world—more than a hair straightener and even more than the latest So Fresh CD—was pierced ears. I thought there was nothing more grown-up and sophisticated than pierced ears. I would pester my parents relentlessly for permission. Every morning at breakfast I…
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When I was in high school I had an English teacher who was a self-proclaimed language snob. With hunched shoulders and a heavy scowl he would stalk the corridors, scanning the cacophony of teenage girls for sloppy English. If he heard you say ‘presume’ when you should have said ‘assume’, or ‘that’ when you meant…
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I don’t know about the rest of Australia but in Brisbane it’s pretty stinking hot. When you step outside the heat whacks you in the face like a hot sticky pillow and for a moment you can’t breathe. If you stand too long in one spot you’ll begin to feel droplets of sweat crawling down…
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Last Friday I was pottering away at my internship doing intern-y things (jamming the printer, killing trees and making little people out of paper clips) when all of a sudden my boss did something very strange…he asked for my opinion. I was taken aback. He wanted my opinion? The opinion of the lowly intern? The…
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