Current Edition
Volume 72
Number 1, 2013
The Canberra Issue
In March, Meanjin visits Canberra in the city’s 100th year to take the pulse of our elusive, much-maligned Capital.
Gideon Haigh takes an in-depth look at a burgeoning Australian phenomenon—The Prime Minister’s Library, and how this American tradition of venerating past leaders is being adopted on our own shores. Lorin Clarke takes a holiday to Canberra and finds a city at a tipping point, where the old clichés ring hollower than ever before and Andrew Croome visits Mount Stromlo, remade and reinvigorated after it’s destruction in the tragic 2003 Canberra fires.
André Dao takes us behind the brutal façade of the High Court building into the struggle over how the law should be represented in bricks and mortar and Frank Bowden invites us into the infectious underbelly of Canberra’s clean streets and healthful citizenry. Drusilla Modjeska talks to Anne-Sophie Hermann about the particular opportunities and responsibilities that come with being a diplomat’s wife and Paul Daley delves into Canberra’s murky past and addresses that age-old question, what exactly does the word ‘Canberra’ mean, anyway? And in Meanjin Papers, David Headon takes us on a journey with Walter and Marion Griffin.
Marion Halligan remembers the first years of what was meant to be a brief affair with the city, Sonya Voumard remmebers the strange life of a journalist in the middle of the action, but far from home and Yolande Norris is tired of having the same old conversations about the place she loves.
There is fiction by Canberrans whose names you’ll know, like Dorothy Johnston and Alan Gould, alongside powerful new voices like Melanie Joosten. We present a vibrant collection of poetry from around the territory from John Foulcher, Elizabeth Lawson, Adrian Caesar and much, much more.
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