Dorothy Johnston

Our mother’s face was triumphant in the torchlight, but she refused to tell us what she’d found. Though my sister kept on asking her, I held my tongue, believing there was not, and never would be, anything down there but cold and darkness, and full of anger at our mother’s ignorance and spite.

The last thought in the old man’s mind, before he pressed his foot on the accelerator and brought Quicksilver down to lie disabled in the dust, was of the friend he hadn’t written to. It was as though his voice came back all in a moment and he shouted his explanation to this ghost with his faculties intact, this ghost who listened and who understood.

Much of the language of cyberspace…seems strung out on an axis between opposing desires, for both embodiment and disembodiment. Margaret Wertheim uses that most physically explicit phrase, ‘surfing the net’, as an example. We have ‘visiting a site’ and ‘hit’. The body is ‘meat’, or ‘wetware’. Having your persona destroyed in some interactive games is called being ‘gutted’.

Several years ago, a group of Canberra sex-workers applied to the Australia Council and were granted $6,280 to write a film script. The organization WISE (Workers In Sex Employment) was involved. A local writer ran some workshops, characters were developed, a plot outlined. But the project caused a stir, and resulted in a good deal of bad publicity, most of which used the argument that funding prostitutes to write a film script was a waste of public money.