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The Best of New Writing in Australia

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This Is Not Journalism

Margaret Simons

‘Part of the story of the decline in Australian journalism can be told with data and dollars. Part of it is about belief and culture—a crisis of faith.’


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For the month of June, take a print subscription and save. Four magazines delivered to you door for less than the normal retail price.


The Whiff of Corruption

Ben Eltham

Why would Scott Morrison be so opposed to a federal integrity agency? It might have something to do with the number of questions that have been raised about his government’s integrity.


The Soft Power of Media

Tim Dunlop

Scott Morrison lost the election... But given his track record and basic unfitness for the job, the only reason he was even in contention is because of the ability of the media to present him as legitimate.


What I'm Reading

A Crowd Favourite

This regular Meanjin online feature is more than 150 posts old ... and counting. Browse the collection.

From The Archive: Daily Readings

RSS Meanjin Daily Reading

  • Is Writing a Way of Life? by Frank Moorhouse June 27, 2022
  • Why I Am Not a Monotheist by Shaun Micallef June 26, 2022
  • There Were Three Brothers by Jennifer Strauss June 23, 2022
  • Legal Fictions by David S. Caudill June 22, 2022
  • A Summer Winter by Charles Higham June 21, 2022

Daily Reading Archive

‘Do you want to feel how it feels?’ Watching Stranger Things
Kirsten Tranter

In the trailer for the new volume of Stranger Things, the eighties-homage paranormal series from Netflix created by self-identified nerds the Duffer Brothers, Max, a young girl, stands alone, gazing at a ruined version of her own world. Cut to all the kids sitting in grim silence together in a speeding van while an adult voiceover says ‘I know you’re frightened,’ and acknowledges that they are not prepared for the fight to come. ‘You’re not ready.’ There could be no better allegory for the hell that kids all over the world have survived these past couple of years, and their […]

Scott Free But Still In Chains
Tim Dunlop

The unbridled joy that comes with knowing we will never again have to deal with the entity formerly known as Prime Minister Scott Morrison is leavened by the fact that we had to put up with him in the first place. Not just put up with him but act as if the destruction he was wreaking was somehow invisible.

This Week: Poets Respond to Dante Poetry Event

Join us on Thursday 23 June in the Baillieu Library for an evening of poetry inspired the exhibition, Epic and Divine: Dante’s World. The University of Melbourne’s Archives and Special Collections have collaborated with Meanjin to commission some of Australia’s finest emerging young poets to create pieces in response to the work of Dante. You’ll hear Wen-Juenn Lee, George Cox and Nandini Shah read their original works, plus special guest Jessica L. Wilkinson performing a poem written in collaboration with award-winning Singaporean poet Alvin Pang. Come along for a drink and to immerse yourself in the splendour of the Epic and Divine: […]

Magpies and Memory
Mary Garden

Plagiarism has been in the news lately. On May 9, Jumi Bello’s personal essay explaining why she plagiarised parts of her debut novel The Leaving the novel was pulled from the website Literary Hub because the essay itself included plagiarised material. The Leaving had been scheduled to come out in July but was cancelled in February by Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Books, after Bello herself disclosed her plagiarism to the publisher. Although the Literary Hub did not mention who Bello had plagiarised, it turned out to be Jonathan Bailey, the author of the website Plagiarism Today. He writes […]

Essays
Vierge Ouvrante, Opening Virgin
Amaryllis Gacioppo

We were up around five thousand metres when I started to vomit. Not the kind I was good at. The violent kind. The kind that left me hanging over the bowl, all strings of bitter yellow. That’s how you found me. On my hands and knees with my hair across my face.

Fiction
Soroche
Jane O'Sullivan

We were up around five thousand metres when I started to vomit. Not the kind I was good at. The violent kind. The kind that left me hanging over the bowl, all strings of bitter yellow. That’s how you found me. On my hands and knees with my hair across my face.

Memoir
This Must Be Very Strange
Hila Shachar

One of the things about having synaesthesia that I’ve only become aware of in the past few years is that I smell certain music. There is a scene in Robert Guédiguian’s film L’Armée du crime (2009) that suddenly and loudly inserts klezmer music as it shows the actors throwing down a bright-red poster from a bridge.

Poetry
Makeshift Drinks in a Celebratory Garden
Alicia Sometimes

verses of conversation
the ease of company
writers sculpting novels on the fly
linearity of noise
a climate of clanking liqueurs

Essays
Vierge Ouvrante, Opening Virgin
Amaryllis Gacioppo
Moving on U.p.p
Michael Winkler
Australia in Three Books
Maks Sipowicz
Mud
Elizabeth Humphrys
The Whiff of Corruption
Ben Eltham
Adventures in the new Sobriety
Yves Rees
Fiction
Soroche
Jane O'Sullivan
Sleepers
James Bradley
Skin and Scale
Michelle See-Tho
The Visible Heart
Karen Wyld
Zu, or Part Thereof
Ouyang Yu
The Cameleer
Christopher Raja
Memoir
This Must Be Very Strange
Hila Shachar
How My Black and Indigenous Grandparents Remind Me of My White Privilege
Natalia Figueroa Barroso
Scripture of the Heaviest Kind
Madison Griffiths
Gulp, Swallow
Brooke Boland
Leavings
Jessica L. Wilkinson
Meeting Selena
Sue Hall Pyke
Poetry
Makeshift Drinks in a Celebratory Garden
Alicia Sometimes
Exchange
Ben Qin
Night Fish
Meredi Ortega
This Room
Ashleigh Synnott
Closet Monster
Samuel Watson
Rain
Glenn Mcpherson

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