HIV and AIDS devastated communities across Australia in the 1980s and 1990s. In the midst of this profound health crisis, nurses provided crucial care to those living with and dying from the virus....
Category: Grief
Yearning for peace and reconciliation
This opinion piece was first published by the Australian Financial Review and is reposted here with permission. Read the original here. As a Jewish Australian, whose professional and personal life...
“It illuminated the experience of psychosis for me”
And Then She Fell, by US author Alicia Elliott, is a mind-bending and slinking novel unpacking themes of motherhood, mental health, Indigeneity, dispossession and connection to land and culture –...
Carer spotlight: Alice’s story of duty, isolation, identity
70.1% of primary caregivers cite “a sense of family responsibility” as the main reason that they became a carer. But what does that actually mean? Alice (a pseudonym) cared for her mum for over 30...
Happy Mother’s Day! A women-friendly budget
I never intended to be a single mum. Indeed, when I turned 38 and had notched up 10 years without a partner, I investigated having a baby by myself and very quickly decided not to. It wasn’t the...
Death and dying: A profound experience for prize winner
Sarah Holland-Batt’s poetry collection The Jaguar won the 2023 Stella Prize for Australian women’s and non-binary writers' work. It's an extraordinary and unexpected collection of poems, which...
The psychological aftermath of China’s One Child Policy
This afternoon (Sunday, October 16) All About My Sisters, a deeply personal take on the psychological aftermath of China’s One Child Policy is screening in Canberra. It screens again later this...
Missing: a journey of both hopefulness and hopelessness
In early August 2022 we marked National Missing Persons Week – a time when the Australian community can reflect on the stories of loss relating to those who have vanished, and those who are left...
The imperceptible line between life and death
Content notification: This essay discusses grief and medical trauma. When my colleague died walking to work one morning, I passed an unexpected, though probably not universal, sympathy around:...