"The word “akimbo” has always delighted me. Often I find myself stumbling through life akimbo, arms and legs wild, desperately trying to get some form of balance". Close Reading with @patricklenton.bsky.social is out now. Subscribe at closereading.co

[Founder's Briefs] Australia spends tens of billions on subsidies that harm biodiversity, vastly outpacing its conservation budget. Most funding supports fossil fuels and intensive agriculture, driving the habitat loss and climate pressures that environmental policies aim to stop. By Rhett Butler.

Last year I travelled to Sydney for work every Wednesday. On my commute, I would walk past an Aboriginal elder living in the tunnels outside Central Station. One morning he made me a drawing on the back of a pizza box. I wrote about this meeting and this special man. heathkillen.com/merry-koori-...

"As a writer and a reader I am attuned to how literature and art of all kinds expands our sense of life and our understandings of it ... I often reflect on the relationships between living and writing" — Vanessa Berry The first edition of Close Reading is out now. Subscribe at closereading.co

I've launched a newsletter. Close Reading is a fortnightly dispatch of literary obsessions. Each edition features a guest writer who shares one word, one quote, one poem, one book, and one other thing. Free of algorithms. Free to subscribe. Get it at closereading.co

I've launched a newsletter. Close Reading is a fortnightly dispatch of literary obsessions. Each edition features a guest writer who shares one word, one quote, one poem, one book, and one other thing. Free of algorithms. Free to subscribe. Get it at closereading.co

“Wool is a potent source of language and storytelling". I chose the word Woolgather as a name for my studio, and wrote a short piece about the origins of the word, in a tale that spans from the Italian Alps, to the fields of England, to the farms of Australia. heathkillen.com/woolgathering

Great to see this report on the myths of plastic recycling. It's pure greenwashing. I recently wrote an essay on bioplastics and was shocked by what I learnt. Only a fraction of recyclable plastic makes it to a plant, and the process itself is toxic. heathkillen.com/dream-in-sea...

This is exactly where 60,000 years of indigenous ecological knowledge needs to enter the conversation.

The Australian Government spends less than 0.1% of our annual budget on nature conservation and biodiversity. Australia has the world’s highest mammal extinction rate, and is the only developed country listed as a global deforestation hotspot.

“We have produced more than 8 billion tonnes of plastic pollution, enough to cover the surface of Australia with a crust 20 centimetres thick" To combat this growing crisis, bioplastics are being positioned as a green alternative. But are they what they seem? heathkillen.com/dream-in-sea...

"In Australia, controversy is treated as an institutional failure rather than cultural vitality. The result is a narrowing of ambition, purpose and the place of literature in our society. The door is opened to mediocrity." www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/culture/2026...

earth pink earth dust pink dust bush green bush hawk circling hawk

“I have devoted my whole life to coral research. I am starting to visualise the point where all we have left of corals and reefs is memories.” “This is ecological extinction of corals but what other co-extinctions might be happening at the same time? We don’t have data on that.”

More environmental crime with no consequence. Alcoa is an American company valued at around A$23 billion. This "fine" is roughly .023% of that market value. Worse still, they have the green light to CONTINUE clearing for a minimum of 18 months. www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02...

Love this project from @humansandnature.bsky.social. Laurence Pike improvises to field recordings of Palm Cockatoos, who break off and drum small branches to attract mates and establish territory. The only known animal to create and use a tool musically. www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcY9...

"Love is a kangaroo Love is an emu Love is the earth" Vale Lionel Fogarty.

“It was our second anniversary, we were in Bermagui, and my shoes were filling with blood.” An accident cut our trip short, but saved us from driving into a bushfire. I wrote about that day, and our changing climate, in a story called The Lost Holiday. heathkillen.com/the-lost-hol...

If you sit still and quietly in a natural environment for twelve minutes, then the animals there will go back to how they were acting before you arrived: a new poster by the inimitable @samwallman.bsky.social.

My work has always been divided between words and images, but at the end of last year, I decided to dedicate myself to the words. In this transition, one creature has occupied my thoughts and become a totem: the bogong moth. This is why: heathkillen.com/information

It has been a particularly gloomy season in Australian literature, so QUT saving @meanjin.bsky.social is very welcome win. The name Meanjin is a Turrbal/Yagara word for land on which Brisbane is located, so this is a homecoming too. Love to see it. www.qut.edu.au/news?id=203300

We float in the water between the ocean and the river. We watch silverbodied fish flashing in the seaweed like turning tinsel. A million moon snail eggs in swollen jelly submarines bump against us as the current carries them downstream.

Over 100,000 bony bream have washed up on the shores of Lake Menindee, following the recent heatwaves, including 50℃ days in the area. The most likely cause of death is hypoxia, where the heat reduces oxygen in the water, leading to suffocation. www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02...

“Do not try to solve a mystery when you go into a mysterious place. Appreciate the mystery and stand in awe of the people who live comfortably with it” — Barry Lopez

Bush becomes cloud, hot bitter cloud. Atomised eucalypt, atomised banksia, atomised paperbark. Mourning cloud, casting cloud, cloud that settles on the river in the lungs and says I was.

“Great storytelling … requires human creativity and ingenuity.” Could not agree more, but the issue is about more than business, more than brand, it’s about culture. Taking responsibility for the ideas & words that we put into the world. Caring about their impact. www.thetimes.com/business/com...

Here's my take on AI: if you can't be bothered to write it, why should anyone be bothered to read it?

Our deathly heatwaves are becoming normalised while climate action by government and industry is worse than tokenistic, it is outright deceptive. A blistering report by @adammorton.bsky.social. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Is Bunnings stocking forest destruction on its shelves? The answer is: yes. We’ve filed a complaint to ask the ACCC, Australia’s consumer watchdog, to investigate Bunnings for #greenwashing.

"In the shade of the paperbarks, they’re sitting like resting clouds. People of the clouds, living there like the mist; like the mist sitting, resting with arms on knees". • Song Cycle of the Moon-Bone, Wonguri-Mandjigai.

As bushfires continue in Victoria and NSW, historic huts, built by graziers and prospectors to provide shelter in the high country, are wrapped in Firezat. Made from kevlar and aluminium, this protective wrap prevents embers from floating inside and catching fire.

“The world desperately needs powerful storytellers to help us make sense of the unfathomable events taking place”. Essential reading, today and everyday, by Alexis Wright for @emergencemagazine.bsky.social. — emergencemagazine.org/essay/the-in...

Give the land a tongue.

Greg Mullins, former Commissioner of Fire & Rescue, a 2nd-generation firefighter with 50yrs experience, says the most critical thing we must do to reduce increasing, catastrophic fires is "Cut climate pollution more swiftly". — www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/comment/topi... — @thesaturdaypaper.com.au

Geordie Williamson + Ivor Indyk on the work of Alexis Wright: her "big sky aesthetic", spiritual landscapes, and use of All Time (present, ancestral past, mythological past). — podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/2... — @giramondobooks.bsky.social @gleebooks.bsky.social

Names given to the ten largest gold nuggets found in Australia: 1. Welcome Stranger 2. Welcome Nugget 3. Blanche Barkly 4. Golden Eagle 5. Poseidon 6. Viscount Canterbury 7. Hand of Faith 8. Normandy Nugget 9. Little Hero 10. Pride of Australia

“He had been far, so far, in country never mapped, on the border-lands of death” Randolph Stow, Tourmaline (1963)

Very disappointing reporting by @theguardian.com. Critique of methodology is a good thing, but framing routine scientific debate as a "bombshell" is irresponsible and dangerous, especially given all that we do conclusively know about the dangers of plastic. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Australia's arts industry is already so small and habitually threatened. It's hard to feel anything but grief at the successive loss of festivals and platforms, as well the increasing, censorious overreach by politicians and lobby groups. Like cultural wildfire.

“The raison d’être of art and literature is to disrupt the status quo: and one doesn’t have to be a student of history to know that art in the service of “social cohesion” is propaganda”. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

The word Melaleuca comes from the Greek mélas (black) and leukós (white). The tree's signature bark, made from pale, paper-like layers of cork, blackens not only from fire, but tannins from decomposition in soil and water. A litmus of life and death.

Mullumbimby and the Infinite Sadness.