Welcome to my new blog

Welcome to my new blog, where I’ll be writing about books I’m reading, art I’m seeing and other meanderings. My last two books (Double Entry and Six Capitals) took me into the underworld of global capitalism and introduced me to people in business, government and nonprofits who were attempting to deal with the multitude of increasingly obvious social and environmental crises. After spending five years listening to their rhetoric and following their initiatives, I realised that although many of them genuinely wanted to care for people and the planet, their thinking and the structures they worked within were designed to privilege financial investments, profits and economic growth at the expense of all else. I’m partly grateful to have had the chance to see this close up and partly appalled that I got lost there for so long. Perhaps I spoke the language of mainstream economics too well.

I’m still wrestling with this pervasive and sticky language - but now I’m attempting to let it sit beside other ways of understanding the precious living systems of the earth, human and otherwise. My new essay in Griffith Review: 63 - Valuing country - explores the connections and disjuncts between Aboriginal ‘country’, rights of nature law and ’natural capital’. As the word ‘essay’ suggests, it’s an attempt, my first comprehensive effort, to let these three ways of understanding the natural world speak to each other.

In 2019 I’m drawing roses and following the threads of a new book which is making me learn a new way of writing, perhaps in my mother tongue.