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Riding the Menindee Lakes and the Darling River Run, Australia
I spend the past week doing the Menindee Lakes and Darling River run in the New South Wales Outback. It was my first serious Outback sojourn on the moto, but it wasn’t that serious, there are many other significant tracks to explore in Australia, but that would take another whole level of preparation, including expensive…
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Riding from Melbourne to Broken Hill
During April, I went on a journey that was not long in time nor distance but was monumental on the adventure scale. Some of the best journeys that I have done have been short and shattering; it is a rare feeling, fleeting, reflective, a synthesis of rival life narratives. Broken Hill is not that far…
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Tasmania’s west coast on a motorcycle
I often get asked what is the best part of Tasmania to visit, especially when riding a moto. The answer is that it is all good, and you cannot go wrong. I grew up in Tasmania and spent the first 18 years of my life on the northwest coast, and I have been there too…
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The future of the past-university online
After a tumultuous time in higher education over the past months, particularly in the EdTech and online learning spaces, it may be time to reflect, re-energise, and critically appraise. The past is full of junctures and upheavals, turning points and divergent paths, and it is the historian’s job to make sense of significant events and…
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Review: Thomas Piketty: Capital and Ideology
One of the most productive things I have done during Melbourne’s lockdown is read Thomas Piketty’s latest work, Capital and Ideology (Harvard University Press, 2020). It is undoubtedly not the most leisurely book to read, at 1150 pages, dense with footnotes, appendices, and graphs, spanning a three-hundred-year period, multiple countries, and the fields of economics…
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Riding from Melbourne to the high-county
One of the few fun things permitted during the virus-restrictions in Australia was fat-motorcycling for exercise. Sure, you could not go far at first, but after a while, you could ride a lot further than your local supermarket or bottle shop. This is a long, day-ride I did from Melbourne to the high-country, past Lake…
