I stand still on the bank of a creek. It is quiet only in the sense that I don’t hear cars. But the honeyeaters and wattlebirds are busy, and swamp hens set a languid pace through the reed. I am transfixed. In the shadow of river red gums, I could not help but be convinced that someone else was standing there, taken by the moment, too. The sun shimmers in the water. Time runs thin in certain places, I think. Cattle and sheep used to drink from this spot. The pastoral scene is evoked on interpretive signage for ‘Tuckers waterhole’. […]

Job Officer Kristen was the crony assigned to me by the private disability employment service Centrelink had fobbed me off to in 2017. Each of our sessions would begin with me bemoaning my lack of funds and her showing off the $300 nail art she would have applied every other week.

As part of our 80 Years of Meanjin collaboration with the University of Melbourne’s Archives and Special Collections department, we are delighted to announce a Meanjin poetry competition for University of Melbourne students. If you are a current student of the University, you’re invited to submit your unpublished poetry of any length, theme and style here. Please include your current student number in your author bio. Entries open today and will close on Monday May 10 at 11:59pm. Please include only one poem per submission. You may submit as many times as you like. Entries will be judged by Meanjin’s esteemed poetry editor, Bronwyn Lea. The winning […]

Like many people with ADHD, I wasn’t diagnosed until I was a grown adult. There I was, out in the world: setting several dozen alarms in my phone to remind me to clean; leaving the supermarket without the one thing I went there for; replying to emails in the first 30 seconds or never. Every day I looked at my list of tasks and thought, yes, that seems doable. And every day I found myself knee-deep in the etymology of ‘binomial nomenclature’, at which I had arrived because of an urgent need to remind myself of the relationship of Richard […]