Johanna Leggatt

Many of us try to shoehorn what fulfils us into billable hours. Why can’t we just let work be … work? Of all the unhelpful and saccharine career aphorisms in recent times, surely the most grating is “do what you love, and you will never work a day in…

At the end of 2020, when Melburnians thought the worst of lockdowns were behind us — LOL! — my partner and I held an end-of-days prepping session with two friends at a taqueria in Brunswick. It started out as a casual summer catch-up, but by the time…

The other day, in a moment befitting the tenor of 2021, I felt overwhelmed. At that moment, it wasn’t the fear of another lockdown or the slow pace of the vaccine rollout that was bothering me, but an awareness of a distinct kind of intrusion into my…

How are your Christmas plans coming along? Ordered the ham? Decided on the drinks list? Have you designed the perfect menu that caters to the gourmands in your lot, without alienating the fussy nephew who eats only carbs and Doritos? Me neither.…

You are so lucky. Deep in stage four lockdown, you hear yourself saying it in your head, to your partner, to your dog on the daily walk. Others say it back to you too, in the Melbourne Zoom rooms that have replaced lost human connection. “How are you…

Break-ups are never easy, but some are harder than others. During the dumpster fire that has been life in Melbourne’s lockdown 2.0, I’ve been forced to reflect on a relationship I took for granted, nitpicked at, maybe even gaslighted – until the…

There was a time during the 1980s and early 1990s when Melbourne was considered to be a little bit daggy. There were few tiny bars and cafes back then, hardly anyone was working on a novel, and the economy was as sluggish as the Yarra River. The city…

Australia’s pandemic story – the tale we tell ourselves to get through Covid-19 – has changed. We had all but beaten the virus by shutting down the economy and paying the price in considerable job losses. While those long weeks of lockdown felt…

Many of us aren’t sleeping properly, are drinking too much, and can hardly remember what our life was like pre-lockdown. We wake each morning in the new normal to check our notifications with a roiling unease, peeking at our phones through parted…

Sarah Willmott is used to working in relative quiet. The Melbourne business owner has enjoyed a peaceful home office environment for four years, but recently her calm has been tested. Enter husband, John, who has spent the past week also working from…

Feeling unappreciated by your employer? Struggling to muster enthusiasm for the work piling up on your desk and flooding your inbox? Perhaps it’s time to make a change and join the numerous other disgruntled employees who, as jobs site Indeed notes,…

There are many reasons to fret about our relationship to technology, not least of which is the way smartphones, and their slot machine-like apps, have hooked us so thoroughly. Thanks to these miniature overlords many of us now boast the attention…

Occasionally I will get a nagging sense that I am missing a fundamental piece of me. It’s as if I have misplaced a crucial something along the way, but I’m not quite sure where, or how far back, I dropped it. Weeks will pass until eventually I find…

Carolyn King reached a crossroads moment in her life, ironically, while negotiating a roundabout on the way to work. She hated her job, but had always been able to push through the Sunday night dread to turn up on time. Yet on this particular Monday…

When did I first realise I had made a huge mistake? Was it when I almost missed a work deadline because the cafe wifi kept cutting out? Or maybe it was when I looked around me in the street and saw more mobility scooters than people my own…

When the wheels come off, and your days become a gulag of deadlines and appointments and online “Are you stressed?” quizzes, you do what any self-respecting, middle-class woman does in this situation. You hit Google for answers. You take your…

City of Trees: Essays on life, death and the need for a forest Text Publishing, $24.99 hb, 312 pp, 9781925773439 When Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird wrote The Secret Life of Plants (1975), many critics labelled their attempt to prove a spiritual…

For the past decade, there was seemingly one story and one story only to be told about Australia’s property market and it went something like this: a young couple, usually from Sydney or Melbourne, starts saving to buy a house but struggles to keep…

Towards the end of last year, as I hurtled towards near exhaustion and a work schedule that left very little time for relaxation, I had a dream. It was one of those momentous dreams that trails you the following day, shadowing your thoughts, hovering…