Contributors

 

George Smythe

George Smythe was born in Australia in the late 1950s and has spent his life declining to stay in any lane long enough for the lane to define him. He has worked as a corporate executive in several industries, reaching senior levels in each before concluding that the question had been answered and moving on.

He has been a sex worker, for over two decades, with a returning clientele that demonstrated something his profession’s cultural reputation consistently underestimates: that the work requires and develops a refined set of social and interpersonal capacities that most other professional contexts do not.

He is a gay man, a diabetic who manages his condition without medication, and a person who has spent significant time examining the frameworks that various institutions have attempted to apply to him—with the specific interest of someone who has been required, repeatedly, to understand those frameworks without being required to accept them.

He has not followed the standard sequence of the adult life that his culture presented as the natural shape of things. He does not regard any of these as failures of ambition or nerve. He regards them as expressions of the same orientation that runs through his writing: the preference for examining a structure over inhabiting it without examination.

He writes from observation rather than from theory, and from the specific vantage point of a person who has been inside enough systems—corporate, sexual, medical, educational, social—to have noticed what they share: the tendency to substitute their own activity for the outcomes they claim to be producing, and the institutional discomfort that follows when someone notices.

He is in his sixties. He does not consider this a concluding chapter.

Carda Plumecourt

Carda Plumecourt was born in Marseille in 1954, the son of a harbour master and a schoolteacher who taught French literature to students who mostly preferred to be elsewhere. He grew up between the port and the classroom, which gave him an early and durable sense of the gap between how systems present themselves and what they actually do—the shipping manifest that bore no relationship to the cargo, the curriculum that bore no relationship to how learning actually occurred.

He trained as a sociologist at the University of Aix-Marseille, where he became interested less in grand social theory than in the small, repeatable structures through which people and institutions interact—the handshake, the queue, the waiting room, the form. He spent a decade in applied social research for local government in the south of France before a fellowship took him to Sydney in the early 1990s. He stayed, initially because the fellowship extended and then because leaving did not occur.

He has worked since then as an independent researcher and occasional lecturer, never attached to a single institution long enough to be shaped by it, which he regards as a professional advantage and a domestic inconvenience.

His writing on loneliness approaches the subject from the sociological side—interested in how the experience of isolation is produced by the structures of daily life, how those structures are maintained by forces that have no particular interest in the isolated person’s situation, and how the language used to address the epidemic consistently serves the system describing it rather than the person it describes.

Donna Germoglio

Donna Germoglio was born in Melbourne in 1967, the youngest of four children in a family that had emigrated from Calabria two generations earlier and retained, in the way of such families, the habits of proximity and obligation that the Australian suburb was not designed to accommodate. She grew up in a household where people dropped in without warning and stayed longer than expected, and she spent her adult life trying to understand why this had become unusual rather than why it had once been ordinary.

She studied community development and then public health, working through her thirties in health promotion roles that required her to design programmes for populations she was not allowed to know individually. The requirement troubled her. She left the sector in her early forties having concluded that the gap between population-level intervention and individual experience was not a problem to be solved by better programme design but a feature of the system itself.

She has written since then about the social determinants of connection—not the clinical determinants, not the neurobiological determinants, but the ordinary conditions of daily life that make genuine encounter possible or structurally unlikely.

She is particularly interested in what has been lost in the Australian context specifically: the Italian café that understood the slow space, the Greek neighbourhood association that nobody had to join because everybody was already in it, the Lebanese extended family gathering that produced connection as a byproduct of existing rather than as the output of a programme.

 

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