As I sat down to write this—struggling with how to get on with normal life while, just down the road, a massive fire burns in one of my favourite places and smoke turns the morning light a ghastly orange—two kookaburras suddenly started laughing in the tall eucalypts behind my home. The sound sent a jolt of pure joy right through me, like a glass of cold water on a hot day, or a spontaneous cuddle from a child. We’re living at the end of the world as we know it. And, some of the time, when I squint, turn my… [Read more]

Frighten and titillate. Frighten and titillate. Those are the orientating words a new employee, Kayla Pospisil played by Margot Robbie, gets from a more experienced reporter at Fox News about what constitutes a Fox story in the film Bombshell. Kayla, an ‘evangelical millennial’, seems to understand Fox’s notion of ‘fair and balanced.’ The news reportage is fair, the opinion shows balance the ‘liberal bias’ of American media. Megyn Kelly, a one-time Fox News anchor and one of the main characters in Bombshell, wrote in her book Settle for More, that she too was asked about whether she understood what ‘fair… [Read more]

The recovery from this summer of fire in Australia will be long and difficult. 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 until the end of January we’ll be giving $25 from every $50 digital subscription to Wildlife Victoria to help in their important work. You can also donate directly to Wildlife Victoria via this link. In the meantime, we’ve put together a collection of Meanjin pieces from the past few years which centre Australian animals. Have a read of some… [Read more]

As part of the prime minister’s catch-up response to Australia’s terrible bushfire season, Scott Morrison seems to be tweaking the government’s stance on climate change. Whether there is anything to reports that Morrison will do more to reduce emissions remains to be seen over the coming years. More interesting is his new emphasis on ‘resilience and adaptation’. Speaking at the National Press Club on Wednesday, Morrison acknowledged that cutting emissions and adaptation go together, while defending Australia’s widely-criticised climate targets. He also stated that in bushfire prone areas, ‘hazard reduction is even more important than emissions reduction’. Dams, new crops… [Read more]

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]