Great White - In A Cave Somewhere Pointing At A Map Of Bondi

Apparently, Australia is rolling out an enormous new shark strategy involving drones, surveillance, tracking systems and enough futuristic technology to make the average beach look like the set of a military operation.

We now have drones flying overhead, listening stations beneath the water, tagged sharks sending signals and people staring at computer screens waiting for something with a fin to wander into the wrong postcode.

All of this is designed to keep us safer.

And fair enough. Nobody wants to be eaten while trying to enjoy a Sunday afternoon at the beach. It would put a definite dampener on the day, particularly if you had already paid fourteen dollars for parking.

But I can’t help wondering whether the sharks are sitting beneath the surface, looking up at all this equipment and thinking, What the bloody hell happened to these people?

Because the sharks haven’t changed.

They are still doing exactly what sharks have always done. Swimming around. Eating things. Occasionally investigating something they probably shouldn’t. They aren’t plotting against us. They haven’t formed an underwater terrorist organisation. There isn’t a great white in a cave somewhere pointing at a map of Bondi.

We are the ones who have changed.

Once upon a time, people understood that the ocean was not a municipal swimming pool. It was enormous, unpredictable and full of creatures that had not signed a behavioural agreement with the local council.

You went in knowing there were risks.

There were waves. There were rips. There were jellyfish, stingrays, blue-ringed octopuses and several thousand other Australian animals quietly waiting for an opportunity to ruin your holiday.

That was Australia.

Now we seem slightly offended that the ocean still contains sharks.

We behave as though they have broken into our space, when technically we are the ones wandering into their house wearing fluorescent bathers and splashing around like injured seals.

Then, when a shark appears, we call the authorities.

“There’s a shark in the ocean!”

Yes. That is generally where they keep them.

We’ve become so accustomed to controlling everything that we can no longer cope with the idea of nature doing whatever it likes. We track our sleep, count our steps, monitor our heart rate and receive alerts when the washing machine has finished. Naturally, we now expect the sea to send us a notification before anything dangerous happens.

Warning: Large shark approaching. Please exit the water and consider visiting the gift shop.

Soon, I expect every shark will be required to wear a GPS ankle bracelet.

There will be an app, of course.

You’ll open it before going to the beach and discover that Barry the Great White was last seen near Newcastle, Sharon the Tiger Shark is behaving suspiciously off Port Macquarie and Kevin has breached the exclusion zone again.

Kevin has always been a problem.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t use technology to protect people. If drones can spot sharks, locate swimmers in trouble and help lifesavers respond faster, that is obviously a good thing. Anything that saves a life is worth considering.

But there is something fascinating about the lengths we will go to make the natural world feel safe, orderly and answerable to us.

We don’t just want to reduce the risk. We want to eliminate it.

We want to swim in the shark’s habitat without encountering a shark. We want to build houses surrounded by bush but never experience a bushfire. We want to live beside rivers that never flood and under trees that never drop branches.

We want nature, but only if it has been properly supervised.

Preferably by a drone.

Perhaps this is because we have spent so much of our lives indoors that we have forgotten what the outdoors actually is. Nature is lovely on television. It is less charming when it bites you. We love wildlife when it is photogenic, distant and aware of its contractual obligations. Dolphins are welcome. Whales are magnificent. Penguins are adorable.

Sharks have terrible public relations.

A dolphin could probably knock someone unconscious and we would still describe the encounter as magical. A shark swims within fifty metres of a person and suddenly helicopters are circling overhead.

The shark itself may not even be interested. It could simply be passing through, completely unaware that it has triggered three drones, two patrol boats, a beach evacuation and a live cross to breakfast television.

Perhaps the real problem is that we have come to believe every bad event must have been preventable. If something goes wrong, somebody must have failed. There should have been a warning, a barrier, a policy, an app or a government department making sure the wild animal behaved appropriately.

But the ocean has never promised to be safe. That is part of what makes it the ocean. By all means, use the drones. Track the sharks. Warn the swimmers. Give the lifesavers every tool available to help keep people alive.

Just don’t forget who is visiting whom.

The sharks haven’t invaded our beaches.

We have simply become shocked to discover that the ocean is still wild—and that not everything in the world can be made completely safe, no matter how much technology we fly above

My Bedroom TV Is Bigger Than My First House

...and somehow, you still think you could have gone a bit bigger.

I was sitting in bed the other night, watching television, when I had a rather disturbing thought. My bedroom television is seventy-five inches.

Seventy-five.

And the really worrying part? I don't even think of it as big anymore. In fact, when we bought it, my first thought was, "It'll be fine for the bedroom." The bedroom. The lounge still has the bigger television.

There are only a couple of inches between the edges of the television and the wall. Any bigger and we'd have to knock through into the neighbour's lounge room.

Somewhere along the way, we've completely lost our sense of perspective.

I remember when televisions were pieces of furniture. They had polished wooden cabinets. You didn't hang them on the wall. You built the room around them. If they stopped working, your dad would walk over and give them a decent thump on the side. Nine times out of ten, that fixed the problem.

If you wanted to change channels, you didn't reach for a remote. You reached for the youngest child. "I'm not getting up!" "You've got younger legs." That was our remote control.

There were four channels if you were lucky.

Nothing was on after midnight except static. And somehow... we survived.

Now we complain because Netflix takes three seconds to load. We've become impossible to satisfy. The other day I realised we'd bought a new television. Not because the old one had broken. Not because the picture was bad. Not because it was too small.

Simply because there was a sale. The old television didn't go to landfill, of course. No Australian household throws anything out. It simply gets promoted. Or demoted depending on how you look at things.

The new television went into the bedroom.

The old bedroom television moved elsewhere.

Everything gets a second career. Televisions. Speakers. Coffee machines. Even towels. Nothing retires in Australia. It just gets reassigned.

Sometimes I wonder what my younger self would think if he walked into my house today.

A seventy-five-inch bedroom television. Cappacino at the touch of a button. Music following me from room to room. A robot vacuum cleaning the floor.

He'd probably think I'd become a millionaire. The truth is, I'm just an ordinary woman... ...living in a world where ordinary has quietly become extraordinary.

And that's the strange thing about progress. It doesn't happen all at once. One day you wake up and realise your bedroom television is bigger than the first flat you ever rented...

...and somehow, the Squeeze still thinks we could have gone a bit bigger. 

AI Didn't Make Us Lazy. It Just Gave Us Permission

Remember when you had to actually know things? Not everything. Just... enough to get by.

You'd write your own emails. Think of your own birthday messages. Struggle through a school assignment. Argue with your partner using words you came up with all by yourself.

Now

"ChatGPT, write my resignation."

"ChatGPT, write a heartfelt wedding speech."

"ChatGPT, explain quantum physics to me like I'm five."

At this rate, people will soon be asking AI to decide what takeaway they should order because choosing between pizza and Chinese is apparently an intellectual burden.

We've become a civilisation of prompt engineers. Not engineers. Prompt engineers. The hardest part of many people's day is typing, "Can you make this sound more professional?"

The worrying thing isn't that AI can write.

It's that so many people have stopped trying.

Every email now sounds as though it was written by the same cheerful corporate robot. "I hope this email finds you well." No, it doesn't.

It found me deleting another twenty-seven AI-written emails that all begin exactly the same way.

Everything is becoming suspiciously polished.

LinkedIn posts sound identical.

Company newsletters sound identical.

University assignments sound identical.

Even online arguments are becoming suspiciously articulate. Half the internet suddenly knows the phrase "it's important to recognise the nuanced implications..."

No, Karen.

Last week you couldn't spell "nuanced."

The funniest part is that people are using AI to save time... then spending the time they saved watching strangers' clean carpets on Facebook.

Humanity has finally invented a machine that can do our thinking. And we've rewarded ourselves by using the extra time to watch someone cleaning their carpet. And it never works! I've watched hundreds of 'how to clean your mattress like it came from a hotel!' It doesn't work.

What a species.

The irony is that AI isn't replacing human intelligence. It's replacing human effort. There's a difference.

AI can write a speech. It can't care about the person you're giving it to.

It can write a joke. It can't know whether your mates will laugh.

It can generate ideas. It can't live your life.

The best writing, the best music, the best conversations and the best friendships still come from people who put a little bit of themselves into what they create.

AI isn't the end of humanity.

But it might be the end of us bothering.

And that's not the machine's fault.

That's ours.

Your Phone Knows You're Bored Before You Do

I don't remember deciding to pick up my phone.

That's the strange part.

It just... appears in my hand.

I'll be making a cup of coffee, waiting for the milk to do it's thing, and somehow, I'm standing there watching a bloke in Finland restore a 1938 tractor with nothing but sandpaper and optimism.

I don't even own a tractor.

Five minutes earlier I wasn't bored. I was simply waiting.

There used to be a difference.

We used to stare out windows. We watched people. We daydreamed. We let our minds wander. Occasionally we even had an original thought. Now there's no gap too small for a screen to squeeze into. 

Waiting in line? Phone.

Commercial on television? Phone.

Someone takes longer than three seconds to answer a text? Phone.

Red traffic light? Well... hopefully not. Although judging by some drivers, I'm not entirely convinced.

The frightening thing isn't that our phones distract us.

It's that they seem to know we're about to be distracted before we do.

I swear mine senses the slightest dip in stimulation.

The moment life slows down; my thumb starts moving almost on autopilot. Before I've consciously made a decision, I'm scrolling through videos of dogs wearing sunglasses, someone baking sourdough in Tasmania, and a heated debate about whether pineapple belongs on pizza.

I don't even like pineapple.

I do sourdough.

The algorithms are frighteningly good.

They know I'll stop for a clever headline.

They know I'll watch a dashcam crash.

They know I'll click on an article that begins with, "Scientists have made a shocking discovery..."

Nine times out of ten, the shocking discovery is that mice prefer cheese. Thanks for that. Somewhere, thousands of computers are quietly building a digital version of me that probably knows me better than I know myself.

It knows when I'm awake. It knows what makes me laugh. It knows what annoys me. It probably knows I'm thinking about making another cup of coffee before I do.

The scary part isn't that artificial intelligence is becoming smarter.

It's that we're becoming more predictable.

We've trained ourselves to reach for our phones whenever life becomes even slightly... empty.

We've forgotten that boredom isn't actually a problem. It's where ideas come from. It's where imagination lives. It's where you notice the clouds, overhear funny conversations, remember something important, or simply enjoy five minutes of peace.

Instead, we've filled every tiny crack in our day with endless scrolling.

And somehow, despite having the entire world's knowledge in our pockets, most of us spend that precious time watching strangers organise their pantry.

Perhaps the phone doesn't know we're bored before we do. Perhaps we've simply forgotten what it feels like not to be entertained every waking second.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to check something on my phone.

I've completely forgotten what it was.

Funerals, Potholes and Pokies

The alarm went off at 7.30 a.m.

I know that doesn't sound particularly early to most people, but these days it felt positively cruel. There was a time I'd be up before the birds without a second thought. Now, anything before eight requires negotiation.

Outside it was freezing. Rain was drizzling down, the sky was grey, and all I wanted to do was crawl back under the doona.

Instead, I climbed into the car with my brother and sister and headed for Bendigo for my aunt's funeral.

It's about two and a half hours on a good day.

Yesterday wasn't a good day.

The traffic crawled for what seemed like forever, and once we escaped that, we were introduced to another Victorian attraction... potholes.

Honestly, Jacinta Allen, perhaps instead of announcing another shiny new project, you could spend a few dollars filling the craters between Geelong and Bendigo. Some of those holes were big enough to have their own postcodes. I was half expecting to see road signs saying, "Welcome to Pothole. Population: Three Hubcaps."

Eventually we arrived.

Funerals are odd occasions. Nobody wants the reason for the gathering, yet it becomes a family reunion all the same.

We caught up with cousins, uncles, aunts and relatives we hadn't seen for years. Stories started flowing almost immediately. The older stories became funnier with every telling, and by the end of the afternoon we were all laughing about things that happened decades ago as though they'd happened last week.

My aunt made it to ninety-one. That's a pretty good innings. I think she'd have been pleased that there were more laughter than tears.

After the formalities, everyone headed across to the hall for afternoon tea; where we dumped half the people and headed off to the RSL.

A few drinks somehow became quite a few drinks, and before long someone suggested a visit to the pokies. As it turns out, my aunt must have been looking after me because I walked away two hundred dollars richer. 

Thank you, Aunty.

My sister and I, loath to stay any later and watch the chorus of the shouts for "whiskey!!" went home at about 9.30 where we staggered to bed.

This morning it was time to head home.

I travelled back with my brother and my two sisters, bouncing our way down the same pothole-infested road towards Geelong.

It gave us a few more hours to chat, laugh and remember.

Funny how funerals work.

You go to say goodbye to one person, but somehow end up reconnecting with everyone else. It was a long couple of days; but I'm glad I went!

Cold.

Wet.

A little emotional.

A little blurry by the end.

Alot of laughter and memories.

And I wouldn't have missed it for the world.