Ashley Hay Ashley Hay i(A4851 works by)
Born: Established: 1971 ;
Gender: Female
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Works By

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1 Beyond the Frontier Storytelling and the Power of New Thought Ashley Hay , 2022 single work essay
— Appears in: Griffith Review , no. 76 2022; (p. 7-15)

'A LONG TIME ago, I spent a day on a replica of HMS Endeavour on Sydney Harbour. It was an uncanny experience. This ship, a reconstruction, seemed an almost inconceivably small thing to have delivered so much change and disruption to the Southern Hemisphere. The knowledge that I was part of the settlement that had resulted – over time – from its visit had to sit alongside the havoc that settlement had brought. At a level of simple geography, it was also uncanny: Sydney Harbour is a body of water the original ship never entered, embraced by shorelines its sailors never saw. This voyage wasn’t re-creating anything that had ever actually happened. ' (Introduction)

1 y separately published work icon Griffith Review Acts of Reckoning no. 76 Ashley Hay (editor), Teela Reid (editor), 2022 24442457 2022 periodical issue

'Four years on from the Uluru Statement from the Heart, there’s a clear divide between the groundswell of popular support to recognise the rightful place of First Nations people in Australia’s democratic life and ongoing political inertia in the same space. Tensions remain between long denials and new possibilities: is Australia ready to heal its brutal legacy of settler colonialism? How can we begin to imagine a better future without a full recognition of the past and a full recognition of the moral force of First Nations? And how can this examination and exchange – or reckoning in any context – take place in an era of quick assumptions and divides, alternative facts and cancellations?

'Griffith Review 76: Acts of Reckoning is a wide-ranging discussion of the multifaceted issues at play in Australia’s fraught journey towards a full settlement with Indigenous peoples. Can its leaders take up the generous offer from Australia’s Aboriginal nations to walk together to forge change through dialogue? What might be possible for Australia’s narrative when reconciliation between the world’s oldest continuing culture and one of its newest nation states is achieved? What actions are necessary to move beyond words and achieve real-world transformations – in indigenous-settler relations as in other crucial arenas of recalibration?

'Examining questions of history, truth-telling and decolonisation, and revisiting colonial figures and their ongoing legacies, Acts of Reckoning reframes the past in order to form new futures – and celebrates how much work is already underway.

'Contributing Editor Teela Reid joins Editor Ashley Hay as Griffith Review 76: Acts of Reckoning opens a dialogue for diverse voices, opportunities and perspectives to be articulated, examined and assessed. (Editorial)

1 Postcards to Charlotte Wood : Revisiting the Natural Way of Things Ashley Hay , 2021 single work criticism
— Appears in: Reading Like an Australian Writer 2021;
1 Escape Rooms : Birds, Breakouts and Bell Jars Ashley Hay , 2021 single work essay
— Appears in: Griffith Review , no. 74 2021; (p. 7-10)
1 Reframing the Thought ­ Experiment : Revolution in the Head Ashley Hay , 2021 single work essay
— Appears in: Griffith Review , no. 73 2021;

'IT WAS ONLY recently that I learnt about aphantasia, a condition in which people cannot conjure up or visualise mental imagery. A friend explained that if she asked her children to imagine seeing an apple, they could describe exactly what they saw in their mind’s eye. She, on the other hand, could think about an apple, but could not bring an image – of an apple purchased, an apple eaten, an apple in a picture – to mind.' (Introduction)

1 Create, Destroy, Reset Forging Worlds with Finite Resources Ashley Hay , 2021 single work essay
— Appears in: Griffith Review , January no. 71 2021;
1 Colours Purple Ashley Hay , 2020 single work essay
— Appears in: Living with the Anthropocene 2020;
1 Samples of Gifts and Giving : Tales from Inner Lives Ashley Hay , 2020 single work essay
— Appears in: Griffith Review , no. 70 2020; (p. 7-9)

'At the end of the first day of spring, the clear sky is dotted with as many stars as the city’s faux dark lets through. The blue, red and yellow lights of skyscrapers, far enough away to be decorative, flicker in the night. The Brisbane River gives an illusion of solidity beneath its polished surface. Two willie wagtails pass calls around the reach; a boobook owl sits in a branch overhead as a fruit bat lands in a tall, straight palm and pulls its leaves towards the ground.' (Introduction)

1 Introduction : This South and That North / Ripped in Half Ashley Hay , Natasha Cica , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: Griffith Review , no. 69 2020; (p. 7-15)
1 1 y separately published work icon Griffith Review The European Exchange no. 69 Ashley Hay (editor), Natasha Cica (editor), 2020 19735741 2020 periodical issue

'As Europe is thrown into sharp relief by a devastating pandemic, Griffith Review 69: The European Exchange explores the deep and complex relationships between Europe and Australia, and discusses how Australians of many backgrounds have contributed to a longstanding dialogue that enriches both continents.' (Publication summary)

1 Listening to the Elders : Wisdom, Knowledge, Institutions and the Need for Change Ashley Hay (interviewer), 2020 single work interview
— Appears in: Griffith Review , April no. 68 2020; (p. 99-108)
'With Acknowledgements Of Country and Welcomes to Country becoming a more frequent element of institutional practice in Australia, where next with respect to honouring and integrating the broad spectrum of knowledges that First Nations Elders and Indigenous peoples more generally bring to the work of institutions and organisations? While a Welcome to Country must always be delivered by Elders or traditional owners of the country upon to which the welcome is being extended, an Acknowledgement of Country can be offered by anyone. Western institutions and the individuals working within them must look beyond the most easily received cultural knowledge that is re-created through romanticised or deficit discourses that ignore more that 230 years of colonialism and its ongoing impact on all peoples in Australia.' (Introduction)
1 The Time of Our Lives : Senescence, Sentience and Story Ashley Hay , 2020 single work essay
— Appears in: Griffith Review , April no. 68 2020; (p. 5-9)
'Years ago, I read a book by Douwe Draaisma, a professor of history and psychology at the University of Groningen, called Why Life Speeds Up as You Get Older (CUP, 2004). Draaisma recounts early explorations of this phenomena, including the French philosopher Paul Janet's 1877 proposal of a mathematical relationship between the proportion of life lived and the speed at which it seems to move. By this equation, a ten-year-old child perceives a year's passage as relatively slow because it represents a greater proportion of the total time they've lived (one tenth) compared with the same duration experienced by a fifty-year-old (2 per cent of their life). The philosopher and pioneering American psychologist William James (brother of Henry) echoes this in distinguishing between the novel and exciting experiences of youth —'intricate, multitudinous and long-drawn out' — and those of later life, where `the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse'. No matter the theory, Draaisma concludes, our experience of time is explained by the operations of consciousness.' (Introduction)
 
1 Introduction : Foresight, Hindsight and the Present Day : Forging Connection in Disenchanted Times Ashley Hay , 2020 single work essay
— Appears in: Griffith Review , February no. 67 2020; (p. 7-10)
1 1 y separately published work icon Griffith Review Matters of Trust no. 67 February Ashley Hay (editor), 2020 18593294 2020 periodical issue

'From our first experiences to our last, institutions structure our world – through education and medicine to politics, justice, civics and religion. But in recent years even the most entrenched of institutions are seemingly on the edge of implosion. Either through deliberate political attacks or as an effect of wider disruption, new social forces have issued a comprehensive challenge to the established order.

'Does this new uncertainty mark a profound loss of trust in how our society is organised and how it operates? Might this be an opportunity for thoroughgoing reform to regain lost legitimacy, or does it mark an end-point for a social structure that is no longer tenable in the twenty-first century? Can institutions adapt? Can trust be rebuilt? Or will new forms of social organisation eventuate from this gathering sense of crisis?' (Editorial)

1 Reflections on the Water at Austinmer Ashley Hay , 2019 single work short story
— Appears in: The Memory Pool 2019;
1 In the Small Hours : Stories from the Madrugada Ashley Hay , 2019 single work essay
— Appears in: Griffith Review , no. 66 2019; (p. 7-9)

'This morning, I was up at 5 am. The city sky was a layer of pewter rather than darkness, too sparsely starred, and every living thing was the shadow of itself in different depths of black. What lights I could see were streetlights, pools of orange on the main road nearby, and saucers of bright whiteness in the park that runs between that road and the smaller street that goes by our place. It was cool, twelve degrees, a Brisbane winter, and two kinds of birds were already talking: here comes the morning.' (Introduction)

1 Retribution, Reform, Rehabilitation : The Fraught Pursuit of Justice Ashley Hay , 2019 single work essay
— Appears in: Griffith Review , August no. 65 2019;

'The perimeter of  the New Gaol on Norfolk Island features imposing walls set with three archways, one high and two low. The setting sun throws long shadows onto vivid green grass and the light bleaches the view through the arches to a gentle haze. This is all that remains of the pentagonal panopticon built during the third phase of convict transportation (1825–1855) to this island situated some 1,500 kilometres off the east coast of Australia. And though the prison’s buildings are long gone, these arches were once a gateway into the architecture of Great Britain’s global penal system – the ‘ne plus ultra…of convict degradation’, as Robert Hughes put it in The Fatal Shore (Knopf, 1986). What is now an elegant, slightly surreal parkland – a landscape that is picture-book perfect – is also preternaturally silent: a remnant of the comprehensive system of colonial justice and punishment that first brought the authority and might of the British Empire to this part of the world.' (Introduction)

1 Crossing the Line : Unknown Unknowns in a Liminal, Tropical World Ashley Hay , 2019 single work essay
— Appears in: Griffith Review , January no. 63 2019; (p. 11-28)

'Imagine an airplane flying north from Brisbane to Cairns. In just over two hours, it will cover nearly 1,400 kilometres of Australia's eastern coastline and add 340 kilograms of carbon dioxide to each of its passengers' personal carbon footprints.'  (Publication abstract)

 

1 Lost and Found in the Tasmanian Bush Ashley Hay , 2019 single work prose
— Appears in: The Conversation , 8 February 2019;

'When I was in my middle thirties, I abruptly abandoned a long-term relationship and impulsively moved from Sydney to Melbourne, having accepted a job as a senior policy advisor on affirmative action for which I was manifestly unfit.' (Introduction)

1 Symbols, Shorthand, Signs : The Narrative Spectrum of Freedom Ashley Hay , 2018 single work essay
— Appears in: Griffith Review , no. 62 2018;
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