Daniel Morrison

A Sydney based father who thinks about things too much and then writes about them

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“Save the Children, Save the World”: The frightening new face of a modern political media campaign.

The most powerful force in the universe is a parent protecting a child. If good people believe there are children in danger, they will stop at nothing to ensure that no harm comes to them. Child sex trafficking is real, and it’s horrific. It’s not ‘2,000 children per day’, that represents the total number of reports. But of course even one is too many. And it’s perfect thing to accuse your enemy of. On the surface, it seems simple enough: Saving children is something everyone can agree on. And
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An open letter to Australia about police and race and the whole damn thing

We live in a land of laws. Decided by legislators, who are elected by the people. And we have a system to uphold those laws. When someone breaks those laws, the job of a police officer is to stop then, and bring them to the court for trial and sentencing. It is not the police officer’s job to administer a verdict and carry out a sentence. That’s not the way the system works, and that’s extremely important. Police acting extra-judicially is a dangerous and potentially fatal failure of the system.
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We need to be careful about Captain Cook

Since then, he seems to have become a symbol for everything that has followed, and people project their feelings about that on to him. If you think colonisation is good, you like him, if you think invasion is bad, you hate him. In order to think it’s good, we have to sell ourselves on a belief that European culture is inherently superior to Aboriginal culture. And that’s what that those who hate him appear to accuse him of. The irony is, Cook explicitly recognised the superiority of the native
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A last ditch attempt at sorting out Generation Names

Alright, we need to talk about generations, and how we classify them. Because it’s getting out of hand. They’re one of those inherently ambiguous things — there is no centralised body that sets official definitions, we all just sort of make it up as we go along. The problem is, some of the terms being used today don’t make sense, and it defeats the purpose of having markers in the first place. A “generation” is generally taken to mean “People born about the same time, who grew up with a shared

Nudity?! In My Change Rooms!?

The following post is in response to an article previously published on Mamamia, titled:“The shocking behaviour in swim school change rooms that makes me uncomfortable as a mum.” Sometimes you find minefields in the most unlikely of places. You take your kids to a swimming lesson, have a shower, and all of a sudden someone is up in arms about it. “Where has the common decency gone from swim school change rooms?” Uh oh. Are people spreading their stuff all over the benches? Are they leaving ru

"My four-year-old ran away in a public place. And I let him."

It’s a thought that strikes fear to anyone’s heart – what if my kid walked off in public? What would actually happen? Where would they go and how would they fare? Would a kind adult help them? Would they get lost, or could they find their way back? Or would it go horribly wrong – heaven forbid, would a malicious adult take advantage? We don’t often get a chance to answer these questions, but recently I was fortunate enough to find the opportunity. The outstanding people at Soul of Sydney were h
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An Anthropological History of Burning Man

This is the story of a City. An ephemeral city, built in the dust. A place that gives people permission. A chance to experience the extraordinary. To explore, express, or experiment. It’s a fascinating phenomenon, unique in human history. If we want to understand it, we need to go back to a stormy night in San Francisco, on January 2, 1977. Four friends wanted a thrill. A wild storm was lashing the bay, waves were crashing into the rocks and over the path that ran below the Golden Gate Bridge.
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Dad Reviews Books: Gaston.

Which has a more defining influence over our character: Nature or Nurture? This eternal debate is the central theme at the core of this book. It begs the question, what even is ‘our character’? Is it the way the we interact with the world, or is it the way the we feel within ourselves? By what is our true identity measured? Two puppies were mixed up at birth. A family of poodles (Mrs Poodle and her children Fi-Fi, Foo-Foo, Ooh La La, and GASTON) seems to have overlapped with a family of French
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Dad Reviews Books: Oh No George!

We all struggle with our base desires. In many ways our lives are defined by our ability to resist our impulses. That can make or break our careers, our social lives, our finances, our marriages. It’s something that kids especially wrestle with as they feel their way through the world. Watching them struggle to not do the thing that every bone in their body is crying out to do can either be good for a laugh, or one of the most agonisingly suspenseful experiences in the world. We all want to be
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Dad Reviews Books: We’re Going on a Bear Hunt

There are a lot of problems with this book. First, the concept of going on a bear hunt and being excited about it. Who on earth wakes up in the morning and says “Yay! We’re going to hunt a bear! We’re going to track down and kill some megafauna for fun!” And if you say “Well, they don’t mean literally a hunt., they mean going to go and find a bear”, then don’t use the bloody word “hunt” then. It’s violent, and if it’s not done for food is actually sadistic. Now, the one thing this book does ha
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Energy — Australia’s path to a renewable future

Everyone knows that emissions are a problem. So where do they come from? This graph gives us a good break down of the situation , and we can see that about half of them come from energy production. So if we’re going to make meaningful reductions, that’s a good place to start. So where do we get our electricity? No, whoops, I mean burn them, To transform them into electricity. Not through the magic of fire, But to boil water, to make steam, Just to boil water, to make steam, to spin a turbin
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What Bottled Beer can teach us about Sustainability

Sustainability can be pretty confusing. There’s so much going on, it’s hard to know what to make of it. What do recycling and overfishing have to do with each other? What are the sociological implications of the bicycle? Where does gardening overlap with politics? Because it’s not just about coal plants and solar panels, although they’re certainly part of it. It’s about how we structure our lifestyles, and weather or not we can continue them for as long as we need no. It’s actually pretty simpl

The school holiday outing that'll make your kids smart and keep them cool. Arctic cool. (Maritime Museum Advertorial)

It’s been a hot holidays. The kind of heat you would do anything to get away from. The kind of heat that makes you literally stand in front of the refrigerator with the door open saying “Oh my God what hell hath we wrought”. The kind of heat that makes you wish you could be transported somewhere literally made of ice, where the sun is a fleeting orb that hovers briefly above the horizon before slinking back down to leave you to it. Where the wind is brisk and chilled. To make it worse, those ki

Raising peaceful children - a response to 6 deaths in 5 days

Six women killed in 5 days? It used to be one a week, now we’ve hit 52 for the year and it’s not even the end of October. Jesus Christ people. What the hell is going on? How are we producing people so broken that murder is achingly common? And what can we do about it? Jacqueline Francis, Nicole Cartwright, Kristie Powell, Gayle Potter, Julie Cooper, Beverley Quinn, Mara Harvey and her three young daughters. These are just the latest in a long line of women whose lives were taken. This is painfu

The highs and lows of shoe shopping for kids. (Shoes & Sox Advertorial)

Feet are, in a quite literal sense, the foundation for our lives. They are the base on which our body is built, our touchstone with the world. So, particularly in our formative years, what we put them in matters. Kids starti ng school is a tremendous milestone, and we want to get them off on the right… foot. Which means they need the right shoes. They spend all day in them, and if they’re not the right fit, well, let’s face it, they’ll probably end up being failures at life. So let’s get this

Stop deaths at festivals: Trial pill testing

30,000 people converged at the Sydney Regatta Centre, just outside of Penrith, for the Defqon 1 festival last weekend. They came to dance, and by the end of it, two young people had lost their lives. 23-year-old Joseph Pham from Edensor Park, and a 21-year-old woman from Melbourne. Our thoughts are with their friends and families in this time of grief, and naturally we look to how we can spare others the pain of losing loved ones. These deaths have prompted the Premier to declare, “I never want

Trump is a Literal Terrorist

Terrorism is the spreading of fear and panic to advance a political agenda. And that is precisely what the president’s latest tweet storm was designed to do. It revolved around retweeting a number of videos, purportedly of Muslims doing Bad Things. The first was a guy breaking a statue of the Virgin Mary. Meh. LISTEN: Mia Freedman and Amelia Lester deep dive on the most immature and offensive things The President’s said on Twitter this week. Post continues after. The second is a sickening cl
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