On Friday morning, I watched from my office window as an unseasonably warm wind blew outside, kicking up dust and leaves. By dawn on Saturday, the sea was rough and churning, foam flying through the air – very entertaining for the dog, but unsettling in its wildness. My flight to Sydney was delayed, there were more delays on the way home as winds continued, and now the news is full of flooding in lutruwita. It’s impossible to avoid thinking about the Anthropocene and its infinite complications; reality continues to arrive. With typically clumsy timing, the Prime Minister has picked this moment to consider weakening our environmental protection laws.

I am waiting for the edits to come back on Salvage, a book that grapples with this feeling of rolling crises. I’m also working on a new, possibly long story. In the overlap between one project and the next, the mind is free-ranging and a little commitment-phobic. Working longhand makes me remember all the other first drafts: notebooks full of fragments gathered in various countries and places and moods, long moments of suspension between worlds before things start to cohere. In particular, I’ve been remembering the first draft of Salvage, written in lockdown in early 2020. The way the rituals of work can hold the days together in strange times.

My other task at present is a joyful one, though the climate emergency remains at the core of it. I have been commissioned by the brilliant Slingsby Theatre Company to write a short story for their triptych, A Concise Compendium of Wonder, that will be adapted for the stage. I’m working on a version of Hansel and Gretel, but with lots of freedom to invent. The creative challenge is great fun and I love the way that Slingsby live their principles. The company has been working so hard to put its dream of environmentally responsible theatre into practice, with a specially designed, modular hall that will pack down for transport so that the whole triptych can be staged anywhere. All will be revealed at the Adelaide Festival in 2026. I’m so excited to see how it evolves.

A Concise Compendium of Wonder will also be the last project Slingsby ever does, in its present incarnation. After two decades the company is planning to wind up – in a very steady, careful and considered way. This is sad, because they’re a really great company, but also an honour for me in that it bestows an extra layer of meaning and responsibility on the work. I hope that my small contribution is worthy of such an incredible legacy.

It’s a stark reminder of how precarious we all are in the arts. The issue of funding continues to beset artists and arts organisations, and the apparent ability of donors to intervene in restricting artists’ voices (Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, State Library of Victoria, Sydney Theatre Company, etcetera etcetera) only makes that vulnerability more acute. When just keeping the lights on is hard, it’s even harder to change what needs changing.

I recently took part in a focus group for Creative Australia (yet more arts consultation, exactly what we weren’t asking for) and along with saying the same things I’ve been saying for many years, I casually mentioned that I spend about a day and a half a week at the moment doing unpaid advocacy work. I like doing it, and some of it is simply necessary maintenance or acts of care that shouldn’t be remunerated. But once I said it out loud, I realised how much energy I’ve been putting into that part of my work lately, and how much of this kind of work I see other artists and writers doing too.

Part of that extra activist time is the freelance campaigns at MEAA kicking up a notch (after great progress at Nine newspapers, it looks like the Guardian will be next – watch this space!). Part of it is the ripple effects of the genocide in Gaza on creative workers everywhere. This past year has made it abundantly clear that advocacy for artists and writers can’t just stick to the question of fair pay; we have to protect artists as workers at all levels, and defend freedom of expression everywhere, or we will all lose our right to speak up.

On that note, I wanted to recommend my friend and freelance comrade Royce Kurmelov’s new book Slick, which details the influence of oil and gas industry lobbyists on politics in Australia. As usual, Royce manages to be simultaneously meticulous and highly entertaining – it’s a great read in every sense. He’ll be launching Slick at the Wheaty later this week.