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I Lost My Passport and Gained Perspective in Malta
The policeman sitting behind the desk in the St Julien police station looks too young to have graduated high school. His senior co-workers, clustered in a semi-circle behind him to oversee his report-writing, seem to think the same: good-humouredly teasing him about his pretty eyes and winking to me as they explain that he’s single.…
What The Mountains Shouted Back
“You are not drunk!” It’s two in the morning and I’m shouting at a mountain – I’m definitely drunk. A weekend trip that replaced Tokyo’s highrise buildings with grand mountains was a much-needed breath of fresh air. I was in Japan to encourage my identity as a writer and add some fresh work to my…
An Encounter With a Cult in Tokyo
My housemates buy overpriced drinks and sit down at the window seats inside the Starbucks across from us, camera phones at the ready. I nervously wait with two Swedish guys I met last week outside the west gate of Ikebukuro station. It’s already dark and the humidity is off the charts. Japan is sweltering in…
El Abuelo’s Ashes
Buenaventura Bravo’s main job during the Spanish Civil War was getting his goats out of the village and into the mountains. This was no top-secret mission, entrusted upon young ’Ventura by the besieged Republican government in Madrid, just something that had to be done; this was the day-to-day life that continued to unfold regardless of…
Dating in the COVID Era
There is a kind of sexual urgency in the air since human touch became a scarcity. The prospect of a complete lockdown will see single people cooped up with nothing but Netflix and toys purchased from the kind of store you wouldn’t window shop with your grandparents. I can feel it. A glance at the…
Coronavirus and the Roar of America
I read an article once, by a man whose name I cannot remember, which attributed the differences between occidental and oriental cultures to the incidence of communicable disease. Asia, he argued, has historically been prone to outbreaks of diverse and deadly communicable diseases. As a result, foreigners were treated with suspicion, since foreigner people often…

Astray is a storytelling project centred on travel, place, culture and identity.

We’re run by a team of writers who mostly live, work and play in nipaluna / Hobart. With reverence, we acknowledge the Tasmanian Aboriginal people as the traditional and ongoing custodians of trouwunna / lutruwita / Tasmania: land that was stolen and never ceded. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging.