James Mollison was a great and fortunate art museum Director. His tenure at the National Gallery of Australia from 1971, when he was appointed Acting Director, coincided with the Whitlam Governments, with Whitlam himself as Minister for the Arts. Mollison enjoyed the PM’s confidence and with that updraft behind him, he could make such bold acquisitions as Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles ($1.3m) and Willem de Kooning’s Woman V  ($650,000). In those palmy days, the Australian dollar outshone the Yankee one. The price tag for the Pollock was US$2m and US$1m for the de Kooning. Whitlam and Mollison shared a vision of creating […]

Millions of animals, birds and insects will need our help in the coming months if they, and their precious habitat, are to survive. It’s only a little, but we’ll be giving $25 from every $50 digital subscription to Wildlife Victoria to help in their important work. Click here to subscribe. We’ve also pulled together a small collections of writing from the recent Meanjin past which all deal with climate and fire in some way. From essays to fiction, poetry and memoir, there’s plenty of thoughtful reading below. Unearthed: Last Days of the Anthropocene by James Bradley The Invisible Extinctions by Jane Rawson The Unlearned Country by Dr Phillip Zylstra Walking […]

In a 1994 episode of The Simpsons, grizzled barkeeper, Moe Szyslak, is revealed to secretly shutter his tavern every Wednesday night. He uses these evenings to read at the local homeless shelter. In my favourite scene, Moe reads—to his audience of Springfield hobos—the (fabricated) final line from Louisa May Alcott’s novel: ‘And then they realised they were no longer little girls: they were little women.’ Reverently Moe closes the book and a trickle of tears runs down his yellow cheek. This is my go-to Little Women memory. I first read the novel when I was ten or eleven. I hated […]

I once sat with Fred Fletcher in White’s River Hut, listening to his stories of the years when he had leased the country to run sheep. As a young man in 1939 he had stood on the high crags and watched furnace winds drive flames up the western fall of the Main Range. Fred was one of many I spent time with, reconstructing the story and creating the first-ever map of the Black Friday fires in NSW. That map resurfaced recently when the great champion of climate inaction Bjørn Lomborg downloaded it and it was posted on the page of […]