It was inevitable that a big life change like buying a house would spark a flare-up of an immune disorder which reacts to stress. Anything which deviates from the flat line of normality is a […]
Australia’s rush to embrace sweeping powers to access the digital footprints of its citizenry has raised the existential age-old question: What is a journalist? The development of the government’s data retention bill and its implications […]
In a scene straight out of childhood, I was sitting at the breakfast table with my father Jack Spackman, both of us with noses buried in the morning newspaper. It was one of the last times […]
It was a bleak day for Democracy in Queensland on Saturday, 31 January 2015. As voters went to the polls, something didn’t smell right. An important element was missing. And its absence was to cost […]
Any faint hope that a new year would shine a light in the growing darkness enveloping our planet was quickly shattered with the slaughter of a bunch of cartoonists working for an obscure publication in […]
Why shouldn’t Hong Kong people decide what happens to Hong Kong? It’s a simple question with a straightforward and, I fear, unchanging answer – China won’t tolerate it. The received wisdom was that Hong Kong people […]
Reports of the death of democracy, friends, have been greatly exaggerated. An 11th hour boost to its flagging heart has demonstrated, just in time, that there’s life in the old girl yet. It turns out […]
It’s Abbott Hour, when I settle down to the ironing and think about how much more it would cost to get it done commercially because something something carbon tax. Australia’s Minister for Women would, I’m […]
My youngest daughter the Little Chef has just left home. I’m coping with the grief by colonising her room and filling it with all my mouldering old newspapers, notebooks and boxes of letters – the […]
Australia’s March in March attracted plenty of interest on social media and somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 – depending on who you read – people in the streets. Not for the first time our professional […]
Copyright: Maria Spackman
