We flew in from winter. The Australian summer was smoky from above, the view of the harbour obscured by haze. We had been following news of the Australian bushfires for the past month but this was our first sight of them. November and December were spent in coats and gloves, watching for ice on the footpath and watching clouds of breath dissipate in the chilly morning air. Winter coats stuffed in our carry-ons, we waited at the baggage claim for the six suitcases which held all of our possessions from the past year. It was 6.30 in the morning and… [Read more]

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… [Read more]

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… [Read more]

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… [Read more]

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… [Read more]

In September 1973 the sale of Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles to the National Gallery of Australia for US$2,000,000 was announced—the highest price at the time for any contemporary American painting. Its American owner Ben Heller, then in his nineties, told me in a telephone interview that he ‘got an approach for Blue Poles’ from Max Hutchinson, an Australian art dealer in New York. The National Gallery of Australia says on its website ‘In May 1973, (director-designate James) Mollison received a letter from art dealer Max Hutchinson, casually [emphasis added] mentioning Blue poles was for sale.’ A few weeks after the sale a… [Read more]

Sunday, noon: I’m sitting with friends beneath a huge old mulberry tree, its green providing us with shade. The suffocating haze of bushfire smoke which had been blanketing Sydney is mercifully absent, enabling this picturesque moment: a Christmas lunch between three couples, one with a newborn, the other with a baby only a year old lolling about on the grass, and lastly, myself and my partner. They’re all eating ham, I’m eating lamb cooked apart. My phone buzzes, and I look down at an email from a stranger titled ‘Head in the Sand’, accusing myself and all Arab Muslims of… [Read more]