Léon's Blog

There are certain events that become fixed points in a nation's memory. People remember where they were when they happened. They remember the television coverage, the conversations that followed, and the collective sense that something had changed. For Australians of a certain age, the Port Arthur massacre was one of those moments.

Abandonment is often imagined as a dramatic exit, a slammed door, a packed suitcase, a father disappearing into the night without explanation. It is cinematic, clean, and easy to recognise. The real architecture of abandonment is rarely so theatrical. It is quiet, strategic, and disguised as responsibility. It does not look like disappearance. It looks like withdrawal. My father did not vanish. He did not cut contact entirely. He did not stop seeing me immediately. He performed the minimum requirements of fatherhood while quietly removing himself from every meaningful part of it. He left weeks before I started high school, during a period when my mother was mentally unwell, and stepped into a fully prepared bachelor pad he had already scouted and furnished. It was not an escape. It was an escape plan.

Inner Brisbane has developed a strange obsession with wellness! not actual wellness, but the aesthetic of it. The curated serenity, the beige interiors, the soft‑spoken staff who talk like they are permanently on the brink of a guided meditation. Brisbane and especially its inner-city suburbs has decided enlightenment is something you can buy, preferably on a fortnightly direct debit. Nowhere embodies this better than Total Fusion Newstead (amongst others) , the HQ of masking, inauthenticity and shallowness. Just what inner Brisbane needs, a vapidness so thick it inhibits the very air in the room.

Today marks twenty years since Steve Irwin's death. Yet Australia still treats him less like a person and more like a national saint. Every anniversary follows the same script: the same footage, the same tributes, the same expectation that everyone participate in a collective ritual of nostalgia. The media dusts off the archives, the emotional cues are replayed, and the country slips comfortably into remembrance mode. But honestly, I don't feel anything about the twentieth anniversary, not because I'm cruel, but because I'm not buying the myth.

Today is the 1st of September, it will be exactly one year since Dolly died - Dolly was my cat. Even now, the date feels heavy. Grief doesn’t fade on a schedule; it settles into the corners of your life, into the quiet moments, into the places where someone used to be. Dolly wasn’t just a cat. She was the creature I loved more than anyone in my family, the one constant through some of the darkest and loneliest periods of my life.

I was three weeks old when I entered my adoptive parent's home, three weeks spent in a hospital ward under fluorescent lights, tended to by rotating nurses rather than a mother’s arms or a father’s voice. People talk about adoption as a gift, but before the gift comes the rupture. Before belonging comes separation. Before family comes loss. By the time they held me, I had already learned that comfort was inconsistent. They didn’t know that. They didn’t know what I needed. They didn’t know how to meet those needs. That gap, between what I needed and what they could give became the emotional climate of my childhood.

Every decade, like clockwork, the Sydney Swans find themselves at the centre of a cultural storm. In the 1980s it was Warwick Capper, the peroxide-blonde spectacle who turned the club into a tabloid circus and made the Swans synonymous with excess. In the 1990s it was board instability, relocation politics, and a club struggling to define itself while the AFL attempted to establish a foothold in Sydney. The 2000s brought salary cap scrutiny and the cost-of-living allowance controversy that had rival clubs crying foul. The 2010s exploded with the Buddy Franklin trade, a move that reshaped the league and dragged the Swans into another debate about fairness and integrity. Now, in the 2020s, we are here again: a behavioural scandal, a police investigation, and a club claiming surprise at a pattern that has surfaced repeatedly for four decades. The faces change, the headlines change, and the details change, but the underlying architecture remains the same. The Swans do not merely stumble into controversy; they seem to orbit it.

Consent is one of the most argued about concepts recently in modern culture. Somehow, it’s become harder to define even though we talk about it more openly now. We live in a time where a peck on the cheek can be interpreted as inappropriate, where a hug can be questioned, where a moment of awkwardness can be reframed years later as misconduct. At the same time, we are dealing with cases that are genuinely complex — situations involving power, grooming, manipulation, and blurred boundaries.

I was introduced to alcohol before I even had a sense of self. Grade two. The 1980s. Back when some well‑meaning but misguided expert — Dr Spock — advised parents that giving children alcohol would “teach responsibility.” It didn’t teach responsibility. It taught normalisation. It taught familiarity. It taught me nothing about boundaries — only that alcohol was part of the landscape.

I was having lunch with a friend the other day while she told me about her latest camping adventure with her husband and kids on Moreton Island. She was radiant and sun‑kissed, windswept, full of that outdoorsy smugness people get when they have spent three days pretending they enjoy sleeping on sand. I shifted in my chair, already itchy at the thought of grit in my shoes and laughed when she suggested I join them next time. She grinned and said, “That’s right, you don’t do nature,” and we both knew she was absolutely correct.

When Jason Alexander resurfaced in the headlines last week, it wasn't because of a new role or a nostalgic Seinfeld anniversary. It was because he apologised for a 2012 Funny or Die sketch involving Courtney Stodden, who was 17 at the time. Alexander then donated $21,000 to a charity she selected. The apology was clean, direct and unambiguous. He acknowledged the sketch was inappropriate, expressed regret, and apologised for any distress it may have caused. In a culture where public apologies are often diluted by public relations language and carefully crafted qualifications, his was unusually straightforward.

On my morning jog yesterday on Sunday morning, all I could see was a sea of Lycra — honestly, as far as my eye could stretch, the entire fabric of society looked stretched and unstitched at the same time. Everywhere tights, tights, tights. Compression. Synthetic sheen. The global uniform of faux‑fitness. Women’s activewear has metastasised into a worldwide aesthetic, and I find it absolutely deplorable.

Australia loves to tell itself it's a country of equal opportunity. We repeat it like a national mantra: work hard, have a go, and you'll build a good life. But anyone who grew up in a school like mine knows that's not how it works. Opportunity in Australia isn't evenly distributed. It's rationed, and the rationing starts in the classroom.

So just a little insight to who I am and one of the things that shaped me in my 30s. I grew up adopted and raised as an only child, but not in the kind of stable home people imagine when they hear the word “adoption.” My adopted mother lived with bipolar disorder, and my adopted father walked out when I was twelve — right before high school, right when a kid needs the most support. So, my childhood wasn’t a rescue story; it wasn’t a fresh start. It was just a different kind of hard.

I was watching the 10am news the other morning when the sports segment rolled in — bodies colliding, crowds roaring, commentators speaking like the fate of the universe hinged on a ball crossing a line. I sat there thinking I don’t get it. I don’t get the worship, the noise, the ritual of watching strangers injure themselves for entertainment. For a country like Australia so obsessed with sport, no one seems particularly interested in actually playing it. Sure, there are high‑school teams, social teams, and all the usual affiliations. But from my observation, people want the spectacle. The belonging. The noise. And maybe that’s the part for which I’ve never been wired.

I have never moved through the world the way other people do. I have always walked a little off‑kilter — not rebellious, not dramatic, just tuned to a different frequency. While everyone else seemed busy performing their part, which I did too, I was always observing. Listening. Taking things in. That has always been my rhythm.