A Message of Gratitude to End a Tumultuous Year
Jacinta and Daniel share their final thoughts for 2025.
FROM DANIEL x
As we close out The Spencer Street End for 2025, I find myself wanting to take a breath rather than deliver a verdict. I had written a piece about what’s been on display over the last fortnight, but I don’t want to end this year with a nasty taste in my mouth.
This year has asked a lot of all of us. Too much, at times. If nothing else, it has reminded me how quickly seriousness can harden into habit, how easy it is to forget that reflection can also be gentle.
There were moments this year, even in the worst of it, where the better parts of us surfaced. Small kindnesses. Quiet check‑ins. The way people showed up for one another without cameras or commentary. Those moments didn’t fix anything, but they mattered. They still do.
They remind me that community isn’t something we announce; it’s something we practice, often clumsily, usually imperfectly, but with good intent.
As we look toward the year ahead, I want to believe there is room for a little more lightness. Not denial, not forgetting; just the ability to hold care and humour, seriousness and softness, at the same time. To look out for one another without constantly bracing for impact. To remember that connection is not a resource we run out of when things get hard; it’s the thing that carries us through.
Before we go, I want to say something about Jacinta — my friend, my co-conspirator, and the steady pulse in this thing. This year she brought her PhD work at RMIT right to the line, transforming a lifelong devotion to talkback, listening and community into rigorous scholarship. She did this while still doing what she has always done: showing up on the radio with warmth, wit and genuine care for the people listening in, day after day, conversation after conversation. It was an extraordinary effort, sustained over years, and one that speaks to her discipline, generosity and sheer talent.
Before all of that, she also published A Wisdom of Age, a book that insists we pay attention to the elder women among us, and to the kind of hard‑won knowledge we’re too quick to ignore. That she managed all of this while giving so much to so many (including me) is, frankly, ridiculous in the best way. It is no exaggeration to say that I would not be where I am (wherever this is) without her steadiness, her belief, and her refusal to let me drift too far from what matters.
She does this because she cares deeply about her fellow travellers and while I’m personally not worthy of her praise below, I will take it everyday of the week because I know she means it and her words always matter.
As The Spencer Street End closes out 2025, I think I speak for both of us when I express our deepest gratitude for your trust, your time, and your willingness to stay engaged when disengagement would be easier. We hope that one day, in the not too distant future, our writing , and our lives, will not need to be quite this serious. Until then, we remain committed to care, to clarity, and to community.
Here’s hoping that 2026 gives us more space to breathe, more reasons to laugh, and fewer moments that demand our heaviest words. Until then, take care of yourselves, and of each other. We’ll see you again soon.
FROM JACINTA x
It’s my last missive of the year. And so, I just wanted to reflect with ya’ll about a guy we all share in common.
This year I have been, I don’t know, I guess in awe. My co-substack bro Daniel James, has been ‘best on ground’. I almost can’t fathom what this year has been for him, and such is his connection and commitment to this country’s heartbeat, what this year has been for mob.
Our Indigenous brothers, sisters, aunties, uncles, neighbours, lovers and colleagues have been bleeding for the rest of us. Walking into post colonial institutions, for years now, to tell and witness the telling of truth: An act that is a basic and fundamental human right. But it’s not basic or fundamental to speak truth and have it heard, is it? Not if you’re blak in this country. First Peoples have been knocking on doors, walking the streets, creating excellence and collecting deliberately and consciously for hundreds of years. With the grace that only the righteous can claim when voices are silenced, leaders have held strong: ‘sovereignty was never ceded - this always was and always will be Aboriginal Land’
And thank fuck for that.
But tell me, how have our First peoples withstood over 250 years of deliberate and systemic erasure and violence but maintain the unbelievable grace that we have witnessed? The dedication to put it right for a future together — to not only experience the colonisation of our land, our waters - their culture, but then spend the next couple of hundred years, carrying the load to put right that which was done wrong to you. The absurdity would be hard to fathom if it were fiction, but it’s not.
The burden generations that First Peoples have shouldered to not only endure the violence of colonisation, but to then explain, nurture and solve the damage that the violence has done to all of us. So, I watch on as the many, many indigenous people carry the burden to set all these wrongs right.
This year while I’ve been writing about where in the bed I should sleep - DJ has been unable to do much more than report from inside the trenches of life in this country. Yoorook truth telling, attacks on camp sovereignty, Indigenous deaths in custody, treaty, attacks on treaty, the adult sentencing of children, and just all the general horror associated with a system that conveniently has no awareness of itself.
I write about sleeping in the middle of the bed while our cultural minorities, poor, disabled and queer mates spend every creative and intellectual muscle telling the stories that otherwise would not get told. Reflecting on this privilege of mine is galling.
I met Daniel in the hallways of Triple R and we became fast friends, like we might have always been. Enter subsequent years of beers and long conversations about politics and the world and other bullshit. But mostly a friendship that delights in and consoles the successes and challenges.
And this year has been unrelenting for Daniel in those challenges: personal grief, generational grief, cultural grief … it has rolled in, and in, and in. And throughout it all I have wondered what Daniel’s dad would make of his child, the man that he is now, standing up with a clarity of voice to seed love and a purpose back into the narrative for this mob and non-mob world we inhabit.
I often think about what his dad would have made of this son, who has worked through all of the harshness of this year - to be a contributor to one of the greatest stories this country has told - that of our first Treaty in this state of Victoria. We are nowhere still, but everywhere is finally now a possibility.
The power of his poetry can be read in the yoorook truth telling report: https://www.yoorrook.org.au/reports-and-recommendations/reports
And the work he did in providing words for this moment in time:
https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?ref=watch_permalink&v=1343981680371537
And allllll the articles you will find embeded in this substack…
And most recently: https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/12/17/john-howard-bondi-beach-shooting-multiculturalism-gun-control/
And then there is this:
https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/09/15/victoria-treaty-first-nations-peoples/
But while this year has delivered what it has, I’m the one that will often receive the first text of the day/week checking on me - making sure I’m not burning out, or sad about a broken heart, making sure that I’m still well and to congratulate me on some of the work that has paid off. I know I’m not the only one. Melbourne is littered with those of us lucky enough to call Daniel James a friend.
So ‘awe’ is my state for our friend and favourite writer this year.
On behalf of us all who read your work, thank you for the enormous strength it takes to produce. Thank you for the better country that one day we’ll reflect, you had something to do with. Thank you for the grace of your parents and ancestors. I hold your mum in my thoughts, lost to you this year. And I wish you a year of writing about why the hell you live in the Docklands, the pain of barracking for Richmond, how good you are at cooking steak, your spice drawer that is both disturbing and inspiring, your advice on putting a cake a soap in the underwear drawer, the sunset from your balcony, the generous yield from a harvest and the joy it might feel to watch as we see real, substantial change in this country.
Rest well friend, say hello to the river and the old men and women for us. We’ll read you again in 2026 xxxx
We’ll be back towards the end of January!