in less than a week i’ll be driving down the track to my new home in some obscure town in south australia. five and a bit years in alice springs. leaving is a familiar, almost comforting experience, and again strange; like repeating an old dream, you’re never sure if it means the same thing twice.

the town is going through some difficulties at the moment unaided by the hysterical posturing of the australian and tony abbott. it is odd not to be engaging with it properly (i guess i am here) but i think it’s also sometimes healthy to step away and get some perspective. that’s the luxury of being white – i can step away. anyway the serious social problems faced by aboriginal people are not going to be solved by white people writing articles. they are going to be solved by working together. the willingness of people here to do so is reassuring, despite all the political point-scoring going on around us. i am not so arrogant as to think my leaving will make any difference either way, but i can’t help feeling that part of the sadness of this place is failure, all of our individual failures to alter what seems intractably huge and difficult, and probably is: the gross inequities of suffering and power.

i’m not leaving because of the crime, by the way. i’m leaving because i can’t afford to live here. if private rent is so prohibitive it is little wonder people get stuck in substandard housing with no way out. the raw economics of it seems to take a back seat. crime is logical when you’ve got nothing and someone else has everything. but then you think of the harm it does, and you find another way.

combined with other racist bullshit about asylum seekers, it does seem to me at times that there is a great bitterness at the heart of australia, a resentfulness which doesn’t seem to make sense unless looked at as a category of whiteness. Perhaps it’s a matter of illegitimate settlement, an awkwardness about our murderous history which we keep hoping will dissipate but which hangs around like a cavity rotting in the mouth. Or perhaps it’s something that sustains us on another level, as if a bigger cultural failure gives us permission to fail on smaller scales in our own lives, to hold grudges, be cruel, live carelessly, and secure material wealth at the expense of life.

writers see our fair share of bitterness. some people resent success, some resent women. it is petty and small and you must learn to let none of it touch you, but at the same time you need to go inside that human ugliness and draw out stories which count for something, which try to get a hold of the troubled places of a culture. i want never to be afraid of that, but i don’t always want the taste of it in my mouth.

and yes, i did promise you a new podcast – it’s coming right up.