Chloe Hooper lives in Melbourne. Her most recent book, Bedtime Story, is published by Scribner.
In the beginning, the rain was welcome. After years of drought and bushfire, the thrumming on the roof brought hope. Our plants resembled parched extras in a desert shoot-out. Rain sounded like the cavalry arriving just in time.
A recent Facebook post shows the Australian prime minister, Scott Morrison, up a ladder installing a fleet of neon reindeer across his roof’s guttering. ‘No matter what’s going on each year,’ he says, ‘getting in the Christmas spirit has always been such an important part of our family life. I do the lights.’ Unfortunately, Morrison hasn’t been able to enjoy his light show in the lead up to Christmas Day. This week, while Australia faces an unprecedented environmental catastrophe, the prime minister flew to Hawaii with his wife and children for a ‘well-deserved’ holiday.
Tasmania has long been a convenient receptacle for Australia’s gothic fantasies and projections. This is in part because of the island’s relative isolation, and because convicts continued to be ‘sent down’ to Van Diemen’s Land for slightly longer than to other colonies. But the concentration on Tasmania helped those on the mainland forget their own unsavoury...
In my nursery school nativity play, the Christmas before I turned five, I was cast as the narrator. My role involved sitting on a set of steps to one side of the stage in Silchester village hall,...
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