My father taught me how to read English long before any schoolteacher could. While I was too young to remember the process and how it was that I came to read, my mother tells me that most days during my toddler years Dad would prop me up on his thigh, and with newspaper in hand, he’d point to the various newspaper headlines; slowly reading both letters and words aloud, before encouraging me to echo his voice and actions. I can imagine my father’s Black hand and his utilitarian index finger pointing to the bold letters on the crisp and creamy… [Read more]
What We Fight About When We Fight About Cinema
How is it that Martin Scorsese’s declaration, in an early October interview with Empire, that Marvel movies ‘aren’t cinema’ contained sufficient kindling to fuel a conversation in which responses were still being reported seven weeks later? The length of this conversation became its most remarkable feature, seeming to entail the logic that permitted its perpetual extension. This essay is not meant to further extend that debate as such, but to wonder at the cultural obsession it models. Because the question of whether a particular object can be accurately described as art tends to be less interesting than our obsession with… [Read more]
How Menzies Begged Macmillan For The Bomb
Nearly sixty years ago Sir Robert Menzies, Leader of the Liberal Party and Prime Minister of Australia, was trying to do a secret deal with his British counterpart, Harold Macmillan, for the supply of nuclear weapons to Australia, a deal he was keen to see done before the treaty banning atmospheric nuclear tests came into effect. A formerly Top Secret file has been lying on the open shelves of the UK Public Records Office and now its National Archives since 1993. Labelled Nuclear Capability in Australia it opens with a letter from Prime Minister Robert Menzies to his British counterpart,… [Read more]
Meanjin Pub Night: Join Us
It’s the end of a big, big year, in words and ideas…climate change, gender, race, citizenship, sexuality, freedom…they all have people talking and writers writing. Ward off the end of 2019 days…Join us for a night of readings from some of the brightest voices in Australian writing. You’ll hear from Meanjin authors: Adolfo Aranjuez Alice Bishop Harry Saddler Belinda Rule Maja Amanita Khalid Warsame Guy Rundle Shu-Ling Chua Madison Griffiths Prithvi Varatharajan Hollen Singleton Fatima Measham Raise a glass… and maybe even buy a magazine! When: Thursday December 12, 2019, 7 – 9pm Where: The Union Club Hotel, Fitzroy Click… [Read more]
Our Cities and the Profits of Expulsion
I don’t live in the city. I grew up there but I moved when I could to a town not too far from a regional train station, but still far enough removed to not see any neighbours from my kitchen window. I revel in this, in the quiet. In our overcrowding world, it’s a luxury. I commute to work, to the university, and I live the city in these trips, just like I did when I was younger. I live the congestion, the damp heat on crowded trams, the muffled skies, the brisk looking-through one another, the sometimes startling exchange…. [Read more]
December Editorial: OverCooked
THURSDAY, 19th. In the P.M. had fresh Gales at South-South-West and Cloudy Squally weather, with a large Southerly Sea; at 6 took in the Topsails, and at 1 A.M. brought too and Sounded, but had no ground with 130 fathoms of line. At 5, set the Topsails close reef’d, and at 6, saw land extending from North-East to West, distance 5 or 6 Leagues, having 80 fathoms, fine sandy bottom. We continued standing to the Westward with the Wind at South-South-West until 8, at which time we got Topgallant Yards a Cross, made all sail, and bore away along shore North-East for the… [Read more]
What I’m Reading
‘The [Lockean] premise that as embodied persons we possess ourselves.’ ‘We can work “it”, we can neglect “it”, because “it” is ours to control.’ —Ed Cohen, ‘A Body Worth Having’. I told the student dentist about my tooth hurting and my strategies for eating. He told me he could see me in 2020, or I could go to Emergency and wait for a day, or two, and pay an unspecified amount. –I’m going to Vietnam, I said. I told him the plan, the one that I had made before Public Dental called me and let me in. I told… [Read more]
What I’m Reading
I have a rare skin disease that can be only cured with amphetamines, sunlight and seawater. This is the only thing I have in common with Kim Kardashian-West. I did not inherit it from anybody. I created it on my own. The doctor said I need to eat the Sun and I need to eat a fish and I need to do one thing at a time. I like to do one thousand things because I am afraid of boredom and death. The disease painted all my limbs iridescent red strawberry fields. Every part of my body except my face… [Read more]
What I’m Reading
Comparative Monument (Ma’man Allah)—Tom Nicholson I’ve been reading Comparative Monument (Ma’man Allah), a book written by the Melbourne-based artist Tom Nicholson. Via spare prose, research and archival photographs, it details a journey the author took to Jerusalem in 2012. But this trip was not a holiday. Nicholson traced and researched the Ma’man Allah cemetery, an important and sacred site in both ancient and recent history. One notable feature of the graveyard that catches Nicholson’s eye is the flora: 69 Eucalyptus Camaldulensi, or River Red Gums. It’s hard to imagine any Australian travelling there and not being taken aback by… [Read more]
Berlin, After The Fall
It is 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, what Germans call the Mauerfall. Thirty years since Günter Schabowski flubbed his lines in the press conference, the world rubbed its eyes, and suddenly the people of both Germanys were dancing on the streets as the Iron Curtain’s most brutal manifestation fell to pieces—was smashed to pieces, rather, by ordinary people and heroes, in front of border guards who refused commands to stop them. Those scenes of joy—families and friends reunited, the freedom to travel restored—were beamed around the globe, one of the happiest moments… [Read more]
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