Community
The latest from Community on Lifestyle Desires.
Rachel Ward found purpose where glamour ran out
Rachel Ward's farm life is a story about labour, ageing and the relief of stepping out of the beauty script for something tougher and truer.
The sea-change dream starts to flicker
Yorke Peninsula blackouts are forcing households and small businesses to put a price on the fragility of coastal regional life.
In Robinvale, half the town disappears when the census arrives
Robinvale census undercount leaves a food-growing town short of housing, childcare and political attention, even as migrant labour keeps it alive.
What Queen Vic's food rescue says about the city Melbourne wants to be
Queen Victoria Market's food rescue program redirects 800 tonnes of surplus produce to hungry Melburnians — nearly half of whom faced food insecurity in 2025.
At campdraft school, the reins are changing hands
At Topar, campdraft school is less about sport than the way regional culture survives through labour, skill and young people learning the hard part.
More
The Sydney dream, revised for an actual life
In 2026, Sydney housing choices are less about postcode prestige than the daily arithmetic of light, commute time, rent and the kind of life a home can still hold.
What a sari can say before you do
A young writer's account of her grandmother's sari opens onto the quieter labour of mixed-race life in Australia: self-editing, inheritance and the cost of seeming easy to read.
Bicheno keeps making the welcoming-towns list. I think I know why
Bicheno landed at seven on Booking.com's most-welcoming-towns list. St Helens at ten. Two east-coast Tassie towns in the top ten, and I drove down to find out why.
What the week before Mother's Day looks like from where I sit
One in six Australian women face Mother's Day with grief no one is selling cards for: infertility, miscarriage, stillbirth, involuntary childlessness. From a Brisbane GP's chair, what these patients describe is sayable, and shame keeps it quiet.
Snow at Mt Baw Baw, a month before the lifts spin
Seven centimetres at Mt Baw Baw and a low-pressure front to 400 metres in Victoria. A soft early-May snowfall isn't a forecast for the season ahead, but it is permission to start thinking like a snow person again.
Negative gearing reform meets the housing problem it can't solve alone
Treasury is modelling a two-property cap on negative gearing and a CGT discount cut for budget night, and Jim Chalmers has stopped pretending the status quo is acceptable. The reform is real, the housing-affordability problem is bigger than the reform, and that's the part nobody is saying out loud.
What Birthright gets right about my parents' house
Zoe Pepper's black comedy lands in cinemas nine days after the federal budget tries to fix the same problem.
Mott 32 picks Crown Melbourne. I keep thinking about Lee Ho Fook.
Hong Kong-founded Mott 32, with its 42-day applewood duck and Michelin recognition, opens at Crown Melbourne in March 2027 as part of a $200m Riverwalk redevelopment. It will be magnificent, and I am still working out what it is for.
Six weeks after Narelle, a fare cheap enough to argue with
Western Australia is dropping Perth-Broome fares to $179, Perth-Exmouth to $199 and Perth-Kununurra to $259, all part of a $1.45m post-cyclone tourism support package. A Hobart-based slow-road columnist tries to work out whether the cheap ticket is the right call.
Rental cooperatives: the housing fix hiding in plain sight
A new rental cooperative in Brunswick is offering something the private market can't: income-capped rent, long-term leases, and neighbours who know each other's names. In Norway, 40 per cent of housing stock works this way. In Australia, it's less than one per cent. I went to find out why.
The Gold Coast Reinvents Itself — Again
From schoolies trip cliche to lifestyle-migration darling, the Gold Coast has been quietly reinventing what it means to live and visit there. Inside the cultural and economic shift behind Australia's most polarising holiday destination.
What I keep getting wrong about the regional boom
Two-thirds of Australians live in the five biggest cities. The 2021 Census paused that, briefly, and the property newsletters called it a turn. From a verandah in the Adelaide Hills, the picture is more uneven and a lot more interesting than either the boom or the bust framing.
The Lifestyle Desires brief
Style, food, travel and wellbeing — weekly in your inbox.
Subscribe