There’s a common misconception non-Indigenous Australians entertain regarding the closure of the Uluru summit climb: that somehow their opinion on the question matters. There are several arguments for stopping the climbing of Uluru. First there is the spiritual. According to the Anangu people there is a songline that is crossed and violated by the climb. We don’t need to understand these reasons, but we do need to respect them. Second, there is safety. People die climbing and there appears to be no way to prevent those deaths while keeping the climb open. Whenever someone dies climbing the rock the traditional… [Read more]
What I’m Reading
I woke up in late January, reached for my phone and opened Instagram. I saw Gemma Chan in a pale pink, one-shouldered dress. The caption read: Last looks… My heart sank. The dress signalled the end of awards season, but in other ways, it was only the beginning. * It all started with the Golden Globes and that dress: petrol blue, shorts, pockets, train, halter-bow neck, plunging back, pockets. Gemma wears matching heels, red lipstick and diamond earrings. Her hair is swept into a low bun. I spend weeks reading interviews, red carpet recaps and exclusive behind-the-scenes. Gemma’s… [Read more]
Twiction2: Our Top Ten #Meanjin280 Tweets
And here they are, our pick of the top 10 from the #meanjin280 thread. There’s so much there that’s so good. But we did say there’d be winners … 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Australian Literature and National Responsibility
The defunding of the University of Sydney’s professorial chair of Australian Literature was announced earlier this month to follow the retirement of Professor Rob Dixon, causing an outcry in the academic community and drawing scathing responses from several of the discipline’s most senior colleagues and professional bodies. The Australian attributed the move to our oft-cited cultural cringe—a national unwillingness to claim as worthy our own literature. Its headline asks, ‘What kind of country can’t bear to teach its own literature?’ But this is a question which draws greater attention to the traditionalist perceptions of academia, to the concept of a… [Read more]
In Response to ‘An Uneasy Ambassador’ …
To the Editor, Meanjin. I refer to the article by Eloïse Mignon ‘An Uneasy Ambassador’ in the Winter 2019 edition, based around a function I hosted as Australian Ambassador to France for a group of visiting dance companies to Paris in 2015. This article is based on misinterpretations and plain inaccuracies. It is unfortunate that the author or Meanjin did not check the story with me or anyone at the embassy before publication. The author infers that I am hypocritical because I was ‘forced to hide my partner in the car so that Tony Abbott wouldn’t have to acknowledge a… [Read more]
Joker’s Maddening Political Technology
Warning: Contains spoilers ‘Is it just me or is it getting crazier out there?’ This is a question Arthur Fleck, played by Joaquin Phoenix in Todd Phillips’ Joker, puts to his psychologist. ‘Out there’ is the garbage and rat-infested Gotham, where poverty and social disquiet are on the rise. The word ‘crazy’ is deliberate. It is the habitually repressed and discredited antithesis of ‘normal’, in this instance the capitalist social order, a system allergic to difference and contest. Hollywood films have a long history of misrepresenting mental illness, exaggerating its danger or its sufferers’ propensity for violence. It’s a bankable trope…. [Read more]
What I’m Reading
Recently I ran my first short fiction workshop. Over the months leading up to the event most of my spare mental time—in the shower, walking to the train station, operating a spotlight at my job—was spent remembering and rewording advice I’d received from other writers in similar workshops. And, of course, some of that time was spent trying to quash, or allowing myself to wallow in, imposter syndrome. So often a writer’s self-doubt—or self-flagellation—is not only linked to the quality of her own work, but to the quality of what she has or hasn’t read (as so many writers have… [Read more]
The Gate at Valenca
For at least three days in June 2019 gangs of drunken English soccer ‘fans’ laid siege to the beautiful Portuguese city of Porto. Apparently, they were there for the Europa Cup but sport had nothing to do with their behaviour. All night they roamed the streets singing and chanting inane songs punctuated with God Save the Queen and Rule Britannia. Shirtless, tattooed, short back and sides and loafers were their uniform. Their days were spent drinking and littering the streets. The amount of rubbish they left behind was astounding; much of it plastic beer cups strewn everywhere and no doubt,… [Read more]
What I’m Reading
Moby-Dick—strange portents and leviathan obsessions I’ve been obsessed with whales since I moved to Newcastle, Australia, from Sydney two years ago. The day after moving I walked to Strzelecki Lookout, my favourite place in Newcastle, high above the sea. It was the first day of September—one of those clear Spring days when the wind is cold but the sun is shining. Just off the cliff, in the wide expanse of blue, I spotted a puff of white like a small cloud. If I’d been a whaler I might have cried out: ‘Whale Ho! Thar she blows!’ Instead I laughed with… [Read more]
London, Paris, Bracken Ridge—Nothing Ever Happens Here
Queensland killed Georges Perec. It was one of the campus legends we heard as English undergrads at the University of Queensland. The legendary Ouilpian author of Life: A User’s Manual was, improbably, a writer-in-residence for a month in 1981. (For a more thorough, and undoubtedly accurate, account of Perec’s time down under see Peter Salmon’s fantastic article here.) Back then Queensland was still in the thrall of The Joke, the web of systematised police corruption that reached all the way to the Premier Joh Bjekle-Petersen. This was before the transformative troika of the Commonwealth Games, Expo ’88 and the Fitzgerald… [Read more]
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