I wish I could have watched Sweet Country with Mum. How, like on the 13th of February 2008, we watched the National Apology on the television in her commission flat—me on the couch and Mum a safe distance away at the dining room table. I remember feeling proud and relieved that the government was acknowledging historical wrongs. Holding back tears, I snuck a peak at Mum to see how she was feeling. She was playing Solitaire, but her chin angled toward the television told me she was more interested in what Rudd was saying. I remember thinking that it wasn’t my… [Read more]
What I’m Reading
Learning from Garlic: My Name is Lucy Barton When I was twenty-one, that giant of literary criticism, Roland Barthes, helped me divide the books on my shelf in a new way: into those that are writerly, and those that are readerly. He did so via an undergraduate literary theory course, which opened my eyes to how language works and allowed me to grasp some of the meanings of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, for which I will forever be grateful. I say ‘grasp some’, because Nelson’s text contains the potential for a multitude of readings and I am only equipped… [Read more]
Children Overboard: Our Role in an American Atrocity
On the recording you can hear their voices. Children. Who knows exactly how many. There is one crying hard. The exhausted, exhausting sobs of a desperate, scared little person. Another one is calling for his ‘Daddy’. Another, sounds like a girl this time, wails for ‘Mommy’. This is the US–Mexico border. These kids are in Trumpland now, and no one knows when, or if, they will see their parents again. Since April, the Trump Administration has separated almost 2000 children from their parents when the families attempted to cross into America, seeking asylum, and a better life for their children…. [Read more]
Basset Hound
My grandmother had a hunchback. My mother made me do yoga as a kid. She would watch as I stretched into the cobra position on the kitchen tiles and wouldn’t let me watch TV until she was satisfied with the curve of my back and the length of my neck. Now, even when I don’t want to, I stand straight and stare ahead. When I walk the dogs, when I pass people I went to school with. When I’m tired. I feel my mother’s palms pressed flat across my shoulder blades and I rise like a snake. Today, the… [Read more]
The Elephant in the Chamber
The issue of population growth occasionally gains brief political traction in Australia, and there’s talk about having a population policy, but it has never amounted to anything specific. Even at climate change rallies I have attended, there is invariably vocal reference to fossil fuels, emission schemes, green energy, political inaction and international agreements—and rightly so. Though ultimately it is human consumption most responsible for degrading the environment and influencing the climate. References to people and our increasing numbers are typically non-existent. In early 2018, after I had begun writing this essay, it seemed the population issue had become topical again,… [Read more]
Shifting the Boundaries
Power pools in the blandest of places. I’m shambling aimlessly around a hotel foyer that could be any hotel in any country. The urn coffee tastes exactly like it always does, everywhere. Across the room, a former Attorney-General and the Member for Bruce are poring over maps of their electorates. The Member for Melbourne walks in, grabs a seat, and starts checking his iPhone. A nattily-dressed Liberal apparatchik takes a phone call: ‘Oh, I’m just here conferring with some of our Coalition partners, actually.’ I recently turned 40. The political staffers suddenly look unsettlingly young. The even younger Australian Electoral… [Read more]
What I’m Reading
It’s day one of a new storytelling project in the Darwin prison and the woman in front of me is gesturing at the thin shelf of books in front of us. Why do the men get to read true crime and all we get is this romantic shit? I look at the shelf. The tatty novel closest to us has a Mills and Boon style cover with a man and a woman embracing. We know this story. It’s a narrative we’ve all read. I’m relieved when another woman speaks up. What we need round here is some real stories she… [Read more]
The Poo Jogger Perplex
The Poo Jogger. A man in his 60s with a big corporate job in the retirement home industry who over the course of a year shat on the same bit of footpath in Brisbane while out on early morning runs. He was caught in a classic case of vigilantism when angry residents staked him out and photographed him with his pants down – perfectly-framed and flash-lit, a quizzical look on his upper-middle-class white face, the veins in his neck straining. You may have seen it. His name is Andrew McIntosh. He works – or worked, because the life he knew… [Read more]
What I’m Reading
I have a friend who is a dancer. I remember her talking about what it was like to go back to dancing after having a child. It felt completely different, she said. Being in her body felt different, physically and emotionally. I don’t know if there is any similarity between that and what I am experiencing now, but since writing my first novel my reading life has changed. I am finding myself trying to remember how I used to read. I birthed a book and now reading feels different. A while ago I found a couple of plastic crates in… [Read more]
A Note from the Editor of Meanjin
As Amy McQuire and others have pointed out, there is a problem with the cover of Meanjin’s winter edition. ‘Given the destruction of land, cultures and language is fundamentally tied to violence against Aboriginal women… it feels weird to see Meanjin crossed out in this way.’ This blindness to the subtext of obliterating the word Meanjin with the hashtag #MeToo was mine. I wanted to give the most arresting treatment I could to what I consider to be a significant and thoughtful essay on one of the most important social movements of our time, one element in a body of… [Read more]
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