the lowdown
Marie Low's fortnightly column, The Lowdown. Marie has more than 30 years experience as a journalist and communicator.
Counting your blessings, and your COVID fears
Anyone else feel like they are standing on one of the last pieces of the cracked glacier as it melts around them? For the first few days heading back into COVID territory, it seemed pretty easy to leap from one piece of ice to the other, delivering what was needed
A letter from your country cousins in the time of COVID
I’m writing this from lockdown, at least I think I am. Our town is not in lockdown, but my daughter and I have found ourselves at home after a trip to neighbouring Tamworth to the orthodontist, apparently on the same day someone from Newcastle who didn’t know they had COVID
Winners and losers: two very different pictures
Your mum’s a bad loser, I told my daughter recently. And you come from a long line of them. The Scrabble game had come out on a family holiday, and I felt my anxiety levels rising. The sight of the Monopoly box can have me near meltdown. We didn’t play
Railing against only COVID solutions achieves little
I’m worried for Australia, where the COVID-19 rip current is starting to become very apparent. The ocean of our population contains a seething, angry, frightened element who can now find each other via social media and share and feed their anger. This erupted in Australia on the weekend when there
How technology rapidly reimagined our lives
There is a story I feel has been left untold. It’s the story of a generation. I have reached the age of 51. I’m not expecting congratulations – I got here by being lucky enough to wake up every day. But, having been born just this side of 1970, I
Nothing gets us stirred up quite like wheelie bins
IT’S been about 30 years since I first crept into a council meeting. I was 20 or so, had no idea what I was doing, and industriously wrote down every word. It was Brisbane City Council. In true journalism style, it didn’t take me long to go from mouse to
