The earth is clod heavy, it glows, deep, red russet and rich.

This is volcano soil- fertile and full of possibility. Apparently, in this place, around 23-40 million years ago, there was a slow streak of volcanic eruptions known as the “Older Volcanics” . These occurred in the Oligocene era, a name derived from the Greek oligo- meaning “small, little, few” which was given to this period because, during this time, there were very few ‘modern’ animals emerging to take their part on the earths stage. But while there may not have been many animals emerging there was

fire and lava

and pumice scarred stone

and this inferno

left behind life,

in this rich russet soil.

The body being lowered, is being held together by cloth,

woven together in a herring bow pattern and it is getting ready

to dissolve.

This body has been on a long,

long

journey.

Firstly the dying,

and then the morgue,

and then the coroners,

and then back to the morgue

and then a drive in the back of a van

and now,

finally,

here.

The dissolving that will take place doesn’t happen all by itself.

( Nothing ever happens, by itself, not really )

The linen that is wrapping around the body in clean, folded lines,

is organic. It needs to be, so the Corpse Fauna can come.

But before they come, with their tiny teeth and seeping chemical

tongues, the shroud will hold the body tight.

This body, because it is in a shroud, will decompose

much faster than the bodies of those who are held in boxes.

A dead body is an ecosystem all of its own,

different fauna come,

different fauna go.

A veritable railway station of arrivals and departures.

Here come the Corpse Fauna!

Ready to devour, suck, sip, breed, nest and depart

and all their hidden work helps with the job of decomposition

above and below the ground.

First come the bacteria, flies, beetles, mites, parasitic wasps who feed

on the actual corpse. Then arrive the parasitoid wasps, predatory beetles and

predatory flies,

who feed on the other animals,

that feed on the corpse.

The ‘Fauna of Corpses’ is a system which dates back to 1952.

Groups of species of insects are classified together based upon the order that they arrive to feed on the body and forensic investigators use this order to reconstruct the timing and circumstances of a death.

A body can take anywhere from 10 to 15 years to decompose into a skeleton in a coffin,

but in a shroud - like the woman whose body I am lowering into the

earth, it can be much,

much faster.

The burial is over.

The body now lies, deep in volcano soil that once held fire and is covered in earth and the broken off branches

of

golden wattle.

The mourners drive off and I go to visit my ancestors. I am aware of the privilege of this act. To have a grave, a resting place, in a cemetery filled with the bones of my bloodline, this is what

safety

looks like.

A safety that has, no doubt, come at the expense of the safety of the Wurundjeri people who first lived and loved and lost on this land - long before the Scots fleeing the Clearances and the Irish fleeing the famine and the Germans avoiding persecution came and colonised their Country.

I lye on my stomach on the hot dry earth, its smells of formic acid and vinegar from the many ants, busy with their work and I am watching them go in and out of a crevice in a grave. It is the grave of my grandmother and my grandfather, who lie side by side in Westburn.

My mothers ashes have been dug into the side of her mothers grave, up near her heart ( on the insistence of my Aunty, the youngest sister who gets to bury all the dead ) and I keep thinking about the invisible ‘work’ of Corpse Fauna. When I was little we would sing a song about ‘worms going in and worms going out, of going in thin and coming out stout’ but so many people get cremated now or are entombed in heavy wood and metal that the Corpse Feeders often struggle to do their work. But now, with these new (and ancient) shroud burials, the Corpse Fauna are back.

As a Minister I am doing more and more ‘wild grave’ burials

and this has woken me up to the

ecological cost

of traditional burial

where the natural work of the Corpse Fauna is barred at the casket gate.

What would it mean, I wonder, for more of us to give our bodies over to this tiny but multitudinous workforce?

A black and white feathered Currawong carols out overhead and the mountains above me hum

with their blue,

gumtree song.

I will leave the tiny living to deal with the dead and I bow my head before them, as I rise up from the earth, to travel home.

Shroud: the word comes from the Old English and means,

among other things:

a cloth, which envelops and conceals,

also

a winding-sheet,

for a dead body,and

fantastically,

a strong rope, supporting the mast of a ship,

without the rope, the ship was said to be:

naked.

So, this shroud is concealing and supporting

this body,

for its last work. That of dissolving

into earth.

This body belonged to a woman who chose to end her life

through Voluntary Assisted Dying. This woman, whose body I

last saw, lying in a hired hospital bed,

in the middle of her lounge room,

with a plugged in cooling blanket,

resting gently on top,

is now,

gone.

Her earthly remains lie at my feet,

wrapped up and covered in wattle.

Wattle, according to the Yorta Yorta people, is the death

flower.

My grandpa knew this. He told us:

Never have it in the house.

And so, we never did.

Wattle is also, our ‘National’ symbol, we gave it to our soldiers

as they marched into the desolation of WW1 and when the

troops evacuated Gallipoli, an army chaplain, scattered silver

wattle seed

(that he had soaked in water for 20 hours)

between the graves,

so that the dead soldiers,

were not

alone.

The woman who died was a climate activist and, at her funeral,

some of her friends came dressed as endangered species. They

sat up the back of the church.

A whole pew of them, staring at me, through their felted eyes.

They all looked, slightly accusing and very sad.

Which made sense.

At many levels.

And now we are here. By the grave, in the bush.

About to lower her wrapped up body, slowly, with ropes,

into the ground.

The cemetery where this burial is taking place is the same

cemetery where most of my ancestors lie. It’s where I came

as a child to visit all the relatives and then eat boiled egg

sandwiches, with my gran, by the graves.

My mum is here.

As I stand and hold space for this woman’s farewell, I feel a

hand, slip, into mine.

Ghost hand.

It is my great, great Aunty Elsie. The one who fell, fitting from

the apple tree, when she was only 21.

She is standing

next to

me

and she is happy that I am here.

The sun is pouring out over the mountain,

the crow’s wheel overhead,

and the earth,

accepts her own.

-exerpt from ‘do they make coffins that small’

I’m working on a slim book

about

a graveyard.

The graveyard is in the Upper Yarra Valley on the Country of the Wurundjeri and Woiwurrung Peoples and it came into being, all 10 acres of it, in 1893, only five years after it was dreamt up, in the minds of the early colonial settlers, who knew that they needed somewhere to bury their dead.

It was in September 1889, that a request was made by the newly-formed Shire of Upper Yarra for an area of land for a cemetery.

The present day site was determined by the Lands Department. Copies of the rules and regulations were signed and sent by the then Shire Secretary, William Cowan, to the Health Department in Melbourne and on the 9th of June 1893 the Government Gazette published details of the location

and the rules

and the regulations

This cemetery is where my mother lies, in her ashes, in her mothers grave.

This cemetery is full of the graves of bushfire victims from the 1939 inferno.

This cemetery sits underneath Ben Cairn, Mount Little Joe, Mount Tugwell and Mount Bride and most closely Mount Donna Buang - old sentinels watching the waves of First Peoples and colonisers and farmers and forest folk.

I am planning a pilgrimage of day trips over the next 6 months to spend time here and listen to (her) many stories.

This cemetery has held a number of names over the last 140 or so years.

It lies on the border of the Warburton Village Settlement and was first known as Warburton. It then became West Warburton, then Wesburn and now, finally, Upper Yarra. It is a place of quiet beauty and, sometimes, if you are lucky, you can see Yellow Tailed Black Cockatoo’s swooping over the broken graves.

I will be sharing some of the writing from these pilgrim journeys in this space…thanks for coming with me on the journey.

The twins are restless. Their little heads bounce from side to side
like curly-mopped meerkats,
unable to sit still.

We arrive in an octagon-shaped space,
with arm-like corridors extending out from a central circle.
There is a shafted lighting well in the butter-beige ceiling,
and we can hear an indistinct announcement
calling names and court numbers.

Everyone who works here is wearing a suit.
Everyone who is here
because they have to be
looks like they have made an effort.
Everyone
looks stressed.

A blonde woman, flying fleet on her feet,
beelines towards us.
“I am your lawyer. I can’t be with you—I’m on Family Violence today.
Wait in Court 15. No children allowed.”

My parishioner looks at me in panic, but I tell her the little ones and I will be just fine—me and two nearly three-year-old twins. What could possibly go wrong?

As soon as their mama disappears, they begin to wail—both of them, at the same time—and both of them want out of that pram and onto my hips.
I press lift buttons, push the pram with my elbows, and am just struggling through the door when mama comes back.

“There was no one there,” she says. “They told me to wait with you.”

We are here today to get court recognition of paternity, so that this mama—who is couch-surfing, not a citizen, and all alone—can get some child support and, also, some justice.

Hours pass. Then all of a sudden, like the flash of a bird plummeting into a river, the lawyer is back.

“Quick,” she tells us.
“Now. Court 22.”

This time, when mama leaves, the girls do not protest. They are exhausted now, close to sleep.
I begin to sing—old Scottish folk songs about drowning sailors and mine explosions, and girls left holding babies, spinning wheels while the men fight the war.
All the while I rock the pram and close my eyes.

Time has stopped.
There are just these babies, this song, this octagonal waiting room.

I am woken from my dream state by the lawyer.

“Quick,” she instructs.
“The magistrate wants to see the girls.”

I wheel them in, trailing textas and teddies. We are a little coracle, being pulled in the wake of the lawyer’s urgent stride.

In the courtroom—which is deeply quiet and almost empty, except for the magistrate, the court clerk, and us—the magnitude of an idea falls upon us all.
The idea being, explicitly: justice.

The magistrate reads through the documents. She tuts and frowns.
“What’s this?” she asks, about an intervention order.
“What’s that? How dare he. Why was this allowed?”

She looks up, straight at my parishioner.

“You are just a mother trying to do what’s right for your babies,” she says.
“This is about justice. This is about responsibility.
The father will acknowledge these girls.”

Then she looks at me.
“And you—who are you?”

At this stage I am on the floor with a blanket and the girls.

“I am her minister,” I say.
“I am Reverend Alexandra Sangster.”

“Yes,” she says.
“Yes, you are. Good on you.”

Suddenly she softens, looking at the twins and then back to Mama.
“These are the hardest times,” she says,
“but there is so much joy. I remember—with my boys.”

“Stop recording,” she says to the clerk.
Then she tells us stories—of women who were wronged, just like in the songs I was singing moments before.
But this time it is 2026, and she is the magistrate, and I am the priest, and the mama is being honoured, her pain acknowledged, her courage applauded.

The twins begin to run—
sweet sparrows of joy, looping around us.
A mini murmuration.
A ribbon of rebellion.
Running in court!

I try to bring them back to the blanket, but the magistrate smiles.

“Let them run,” she says.
“Let them run.”

And so we do.

And they are laughing.

And as I walk past, they look up and smile.

Sit down love -sit down

they say

and so I do,

because this is why I am here,

in my High Vis Vest with my clerical collar on. Working as a volunteer Chaplain, in this temporary shelter, set up to provide shelter for those fleeing the fires.

I am here to pay attention,

to stay a while,

to come and see

how folk are travelling

as they sit in this shelter in Whittlesea:

having fled with their cats

and their dogs and their babies and bedding,

mainly from Flowerdale and the surrounding farmlands,

on this 45 degree

inferno

of a day,

as the bushfires roar across our state.

This couple - she is 78 and he is 80

are cattle farmers

and they lost their house in the 2020 fires

and now they may lose it again.

I hear stories of cutting carrots

bags and bags of carrots

and of par boiling them to feed the cows

to see them through the drought

( the one that has been leaching life away

all this past year.)

I hear about their courtship

and the proposal

when she was only seventeen.

I hear about how he drives one handed

so that the other hand can hold hers

and of how, when he fell from the ladder

and she thought she had lost him

the world cascaded inside her like

slipping

stones-

like

a

landslide.

I hear about their daughter who died, bled out on the table

and the grandchildren left behind

and I discover

weirdly, that she grew up near the Wombat Forrest just out of Daylesford,

where my mum was born

and that she went to school with one of my aunties.

I get them some mattresses

and I watch them lay down to sleep,

in this foyer of a public building

and I see how

across the lilos

they are holding hands.

They invited me to come and see

and I said yes

andI walked away

fattened

by their love.

There is a story in the Gospel of John where Jesus encourages those

around him to

Come and see.

He doesn’t say-

Come and listen

( although those who know him know that he loved to tell a story or two )

This detail of

seeing

rather than listening

is important-

for far too long

far too many

churches

just seemed to think their job

was to speak and preach and pontificate while the world listened

and this might be where they went wrong.

Jesus is saying

Come and see

what God is doing.

Come and see

where the body of the Sacred Wild is active,

Come and see

the great signs and wonders.

Come and see

the great change movements across history

where people rise up against oppression,

Come and see

the clergy and the artists and the everyday folk

take to the streets in Minneapolis to fight ICE

and then come and see the Catholic Church

call out the false christianity of JD Vance who says he follows Jesus

while all the while

locking up the migrant

and the widow and the orphan

and defending those

who murder a woman

in cold

mysogynist

blood.

Faith without works

is not

what Jesus is inviting us into-

words are only half the story.

and if you tell us one thing and do another

we cannot follow you.

We are witnessing the worst bushfire conditions

since the Black Summer

and

now

devastating flash floods.

It is undeniable

that conditions have been made worse by ongoing fossil fuel consumption

particularly from coal and gas.

It is undeniable that our current government

came to power promising action on climate change.

It is undeniable that in their time they have opened

14 new coal and gas sites.

Come and see the devastation of our bush -through fire and now flood.

Come and see the cars washed out to sea

Come and see the folk grabbing their toddlers and fleeing their tents

as the water

rises.

Imagine if this had happened at night,

while people were sleeping.

( actually slow down and imagine that, for just a moment, imagine the nighttime flood, the river breaking, the water rushing in through the zipped up tent, feel the cold dread of this thought rushing up your legs and pooling in your stomach, now shake that off and galvanise your rage )

Humans are

actually

remarkable-

if we want to be.

We can turn this around.

Maybe not completely- but enough.

I go up to the couple to say goodnight

She says:

We hold hands in the paddock too

We’ve been holding hands since I was 16.

And we won’t let go.

I go outside and look up into the inky black and smoke filled sky,

there is rain in the air and it smells

like a campfire.

I feel weirdly patriotic,

loving all these sleeping people and loving Country

and then I drive back home,

into the dark.

Are you ready to sit with people in their darkest moments?

These are the kinds of questions that Alex Sangster struggled with as she began her journey as an ordained minister in the Uniting Church in Australia. And the journey continues.

Using the metaphor of Story, she shares her passion to discover ways that liberate, inspire and awaken; and suggests how the emerging church can connect with those who are spiritually hungry but culturally anti–institution.

do they make coffins that small? explores what it means to minister in the context of contemporary disbelief.

This lovely book is easy on the eye, a delight to read, and is a powerful apologetic that helps us fathom why at least some people are choosing to swim against the societal current and follow that bold and compassionate soul from Nazareth. – Roger Wolsey

Ali Sangster’s vivid stories, often killingly (!) funny, are rooted in our shared earthiness and hint at the rumour of God. You’ll find this wee book a page-turner and maybe a life-turner, too. – Rev. Dr Peter Matheson

What a brilliant book – its empathy, honesty, imagery, style, language and commitment. In beautiful prose, Alexandra Sangster invites us into her life and calling with whimsy and depth, through snippets of reflection, conversations, grief and hope. – Val Webb

Raw and captivating. The words and imagery, as in the title, will grip you. – Dr Carl Krieg

Glorious and moving, ordinary and extraordinary in equal measure – these are poems of profound perspicacity, found at that edge where life meets the biggest questions of all. – Georgia Richter

Do they make coffins that small? is published and distributed by Coventry press.

Well not them exactly, but their ghosts.

All of the streets speak.

There is a build-up

of bones

(not the literal kind, not like in Paris with the catacombs or in Scotland with the pits of plague dead under your feet)

but bones none the less.

Most of these houses have, at some stage, held the body of someone dying or someone dead

and then many have held ashes, in boxes.

As I write this, my mother’s burnt bones sit by my bedside in a blue glass jar that once held lentils.

It’s not actually all of her. Most of the grit was put in a grave alongside her mother and father, into a discreet hole dug by a boy in a man’s overalls, leaning against his shovel in the way of men at work, awaiting instructions.

Dig it up here, up near Mum’s heart, I heard my Aunty Cheryl say, and so he did, and then we poured her in.

But earlier, secretly, I had scooped out a spoon of her and popped it in the blue jar – the first I could find. I say ‘secretly’ because, technically, this ash was not mine to subdivide, it was my sister’s too and I didn’t think she would want me messing about and so I did it, all by myself, like the younger sister that I am.

I have visited many houses in these streets because I am a minister and that is what some of us do.

I have been ‘visiting’ for over 20 years. In different ministries, different suburbs.

Early on, I used to go by bike because I didn’t have a licence.

I was a sailor, in a tiny rowboat, heaving my way through the ocean of traffic, up to old ladies’ houses, ladies who had been marooned by illness and age and who were now shipwrecked in their own homes.

I would arrive, slightly sweaty (the scent of salt), and they would welcome me with tea and tales of long-ago betrothals and soldiers and broken hearts and children lost. A wedding dress would be unfurled upon a bed. The best china from the Harlequin set, from the 1930s, would be brought out. Once a soup, cold and pale green and made of lettuce, was offered. I would drink it all down, the stories and soup and sorrow, and then would sail out, into the soft rain, again.

For the last 10 years I have been in just one place and I have got to know these particular streets and visit these particular people. And then, when they are gone, I get to walk past and stop at their gates.

Hello Pat, I might hear myself say.

Hello Pat.

Pat once lived in a house with a specially built, glassed-in verandah room. In this room, facing the street, her husband (him in the iron lung) lay for 30 years, after waking her in the night, when she was just a young bride, to say:

Pat, Pat, I can’t move my legs

(and of how only the day before, her neighbour, Dulcie, had come running through the apple orchard to tell Pat of how Dulcie’s husband, Dave, had been struck down with the Polio)

and of how Pat had to put her new husband on the back of a cart and hitch up the horses and get him to town and he had to be driven down to Melbourne, to the Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital, and of how he taught himself to frog-breathe so that he could come home and of how they had two sons and Pat would smile a secret smile when people asked her how,

and also, when we were deep in lockdown, I went to visit – just to stand outside you know, to make sure she was okay – and of how her leg was bleeding – ripped up, paper-thin flesh – and she said:

I need help

and of how I said

No Pat, the virus, I can’t come in

but she was a little girl, all alone

and her leg was gushing

and so in I came and bowed down before her on the faded rose carpet

and bound her ancient, blood-red shin.

Goodbye Pat

I keep walking. The black cockatoos screech overhead on their way to strip the pines down by the river. Sometimes, in these streets, at night, there are mopoke owls – whose name has been changed by the International Ornithological Society to southern boobook (all lower case – which seems bit rude) and always, there are the corvids.

Hello Ian. Hello Arthur. Hello Janice.

Hello house of the boy who died of an allergy when he was old enough to stay alive, certainly when he was old enough to know about all about the things that might kill him. Ever since he was tiny. Drilled into him. Don’t eat this. Don’t touch that. Carry your epipen wherever you go.

Everyone knew.

And yet, despite the best the family could do to burn all the spinning wheels and ban all the weavers, and despite the walls they built around the kingdom, one day Sleeping Beauty sat down at a spindle which seeded itself into her skin

and

just

like

that.

And one day, the boy ate the wrong grain on the harmless cracker

and

just

like

that

the expansion

the filling up

the shutting down

the catastrophic emptying out.

Three useless days in the hospital

and then his father, a doctor himself, carried out his boy’s beautiful body,

still with the soul inside,

carried him out of the ICU and into the sunshine,

for just one

last

moment

and told his boy:

We are going to turn off all the machines, mate

We are going to let you go

and of how the boy, very faintly,

(it seemed to his father) smiled.

It’s okay, Dad

It’s okay

and of how, later, that same dad every morning would be out on his hands and knees in the driveway, cutting the grass that grew in the cracks, with nail scissors, keeping control of

just

one

thing.

This blade of grass, this next blade of grass, this next …

Outside the boy’s home there is a tree and, in the tree, there is a little box, nestling in the crook of the warm old trunk, and inside the box is a photo of the boy and a letter from his sister.

The letter says only three words:

Come home,

please.

Keep walking.

Hello strange man who I never met who died in Bali and whose widow never paid for the funeral and was one of those women who would leave laminated angry notes stapled with an upright authority to posts of carefully-cut-to-size bamboo with the words on the note printed in bold, commanding: Pick up after your dog!

Hello man with angry, grieving widow, I might say.

I can’t remember if she started putting up the notes before or after he died.

Was she this angry before? Or only afterwards?

There is a theological concept known as the eucharistic collapse of time.

The collapse of time.

In the communion liturgy we say the words:

Take, eat; this is my body. Whenever you do this, do this in remembrance of me.

The word remembrance comes from the Greek anamnesis and it’s trying to talk about the objective effectiveness and presence of one reality in another.

Or, in other words, every moment exists in every other moment.

And in every house is every ghost

and on every street there is a build-up of footprints, like settler song lines.

And I know, metaphorically at least, if not literally, where many of the bodies lie.

And so,

time

collapses.

Walks are never lonely

but are sometimes heavy.

Maybe it is time to move.

This article was originally published in Island Magazine (Online Edition).

It was made before the virus, before we all went inside. Before we began walking, up and down. The jam was bottled by a friend who has since died. And so every time I open my fridge, depending on how overladen and chaotic the shelf is, I see the jam and I think of him, and I am shot through with the missing.

I know I have to throw it out, in the same way I know I should delete his number from my phone. But I can’t.

There is a group of nuns in Maryland, in the United States, who are walking, inside and around their grounds every day in solidarity with the folk in 145 or so cities, across 18 countries, who are walking the length of Gaza over Lent in solidarity with the people in Gaza, who have walked so far that now there is nowhere else to go.

Those nuns who are elderly walk the corridors. The others go outside and walk the grounds, and sometimes they loop past the cemetery where one day soon they will be laid down.

Some of the sisters are so frail that even walking the corridors is too much, so instead they walk the pathways in their minds.

Every day – one step, one step, one step.

There is something deeply comforting, to think of them walking. I try to hold them in my body while the carnage is live-streamed into my phone.

The Gaza Peace Pilgrims are inspired in their walking by the prayer of a young Kiwi man called James Harris, who, feeling utterly overwhelmed by the horror of what was (and is) unfolding, took his pain to prayer and was moved to walk the length of Gaza to raise awareness and support.

This is article was originally published in The Age on Mar 17, 2024.

Her name was Alice and when she was a little Jewish girl growing up in Europe, her father saw the blood-drenched writing on the wall and got his family out.

She grew up, a child of the Holocaust, with trauma in her DNA: memories of being on the last train, of the soldiers and the weeping and the smashing of glass.

I stood with my friend at Springvale Cemetery, surrounded by the graves of Holocaust survivors, as the rain fell, bone cold.

The rabbi rocked gently to and fro, reciting the Kaddish: “Magnified and sanctified is the great name of God throughout the world, which was created according to divine will. May the rule of peace be established speedily in our time, unto us and unto the entire household of Israel. And let us say: Amen.”

He told stories of Alice and of her life, which was so hard. At one point, when my friend had to share his eulogy and when the rain was pelting slantways, he handed me his violin and I cradled it, like a newborn, under my good coat.

Normally he won’t let anyone hold his violin, and I felt the weight and the honour.

I am his friend of 20 years, I am a Christian minister, I am standing under winter gums with Jewish bodies deep in the earth.

I am holding the instrument that has played the songs of his people, across the seas and the villages and through the pogroms and into the ovens.

This is article was originally published in The Age on May 12, 2024.

I am picking up sodden scraps of decomposing plastic,

from a gutter,

by the side of the road.

It is the middle of the day,

hot now and I still have my bike helmet on and my headphones in.

I am,

a little,

overwhelmed.

I have just come from a shift as an emergency chaplain with the VCC and I am on my way home. But then I see them—the flowers, wrapped with ribbons. Beautiful and bright, laid on the footpath where the boy was shot.

It is a narrow street, like a thin artery shooting out from the main vein of the road and there is not much on it but the sides of buildings and a bluestone church and the flowers, all bright and beautiful and lying in filth.

An hour earlier I had spoken with members of the family who had come down from the flat where the boy’s father sat. We shook hands in a shared remembering that we are good—actually, all of us—and that we will show up for one another when we can.

‘He will not be alone’

They told me.

‘He will not be alone’

And now I am here, picking up a discarded COVID mask, one blue plastic glove, and a rotting sheet, making space for a memorial for a boy now gone.

There is something deeply necessary about this mucky work,

it cannot

not

be done

and yet it also feels conspicuous and ridiculous

in equal measure.

How me putting my hands into this drain of sodden detritus helps

the broken father or the soul of the boy

is unclear, but I can’t not do it.

When I am finished, I turn my bike toward home and hear a man yelling at a puppy. The dog is tiny and exhausted and the man is cursing at him, lifting him by the lead from his neck.

“Stand up,” he yells. “Stand up.”

I take off my helmet and rest my bike against a pole.

“Can I say hello to your pup?” I ask, and immediately he softens.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah.”

“What’s his name?”

“This is Charlie.”

“Charlie’s only a baby,” I tell him. “He’s going to get tired. It’s okay for him to sleep.”

“Yeah, yeah,” the man nods, then picks up his dog and runs for the tram.

A woman walking past—clean as a daisy, with bright, clear eyes—says,

“Thank you. Thank you for saying something. I was afraid. I didn’t know what to do.”

“Just say something,” I offer. “But say it with love. That usually works. But always say something, if you can.”

I realise I’m beginning to preach. It is definitely time to go home.

I take one last look up at the towers, where the father sits,

in his terrible,

terrible

grief

and I bow my head

and then take the lanyard from around my neck and ride off,

into the heat of the day.

Originally published in The Age - January 11, 2026

I work at the Engagement Hub in St Kilda.

It’s is a Drop In- a place of welcome

for those experiencing drug addiction, mental health vulnerabilities

and homelessness.

And this week

we were talking about the Bondi massacre,

of course.

And the stories,

that everyone was sharing

( Tell it again, tell again, tell it just the same )

were the stories of the acts of heroism .

The stories of the older couple:

Boris and Sofia

that tried to stop the son

with the gun

before it all began.

And the stories of Ahmed al-Ahmed

the Syrian born

Australian father

of a two girls

who is bandaged up

in a Sydney hospital

and who the whole world

has fallen in love with.

And the story of the woman

comforting a child

who is not her own

as they hide together

under plastic chairs.

“It’ll be alright”

she says,

over and over again

“We will be okay. I’ve got you”

These are the stories that people wanted to tell

( over and over again )

because these are the stories

that tell us

that

fundamentally

humans are loving

and do not want to harm each other

and do want

to keep each other safe

and that

some of us

will sacrifice our lives for others

and some of us

will reach out our hands

in the dark

and hold

on

tight.

These are the stories,

that give us the energy

( again and again )

to not give up

and to believe

that we

can

make a difference

in this world

and that we can,

together,

turn this shadow wrecked shell of humanity

around

to face the light.

today—

if Christ were born now—

he would not be laid on a shining throne.

He would be laid in rubble.

In Gaza, and in Ukraine and in Sudan

and he would be born

on broken stone

and on the golden sand

of this land

that has known massacre before

and now knows it

again.

But that is not the story

that we will tell

( over and over again )

“did you hear about Ahmed al-Ahmed?”

We will say.

Tell it again, tell it again, tell it just the same.