My brother-in-law once told me a story about being on a train in London back in the late eighties and getting into a conversation with the guy next to him. Turned out the guy was in advertising. I must say, my brother-in-law said, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an advertisement for something and thought, I must go and buy that. I’m not sure advertising really works, he continued, not on me, anyway. The ad guy smiled. What car do you own? What watch are wearing? Which shoes? What refrigerator do you have in your home? Have you ever bought… [Read more]

Here we go again. As we enter another fraught, ill-tempered and polarising Federal election campaign, attention turns once more to how hopelessly biased the media are. Take your pick of the following evergreen favourites: The Murdoch media is the spawn of the devil, propping up conservative governments and big business and hating the poor and marginalised. The ABC is a woke, politically correct left wing staff-run cabal, sipping their lattes and chardonnay as they impose their agenda on ordinary, hard-working Aussies. Oh and by the way, the ABC has also been totally destroyed by funding cuts and its own stacked… [Read more]

Let’s start with something positive, to remind ourselves that a better world of political reporting is possible. On Monday evening, the first Monday of the election, Laura Tingle took to the airwaves of the ABC’s 730 program and delivered a package that showed journalism can be about context across a full term of government and not just gotchas within the artificially constructed limitations of an election campaign grab.

In the United States of America, the wealth gap between white males and African American women is immense. According to a McKinsey Global Institute report, the median wealth of a single black woman is USD$200 compared to a median wealth of USD $28,900 for a white man. One could attempt to justify the gap on the level of generational wealth, meritocracy, and education, but I wish this were as simple as an economic rationale. By increasing black wealth, the USA could strengthen their economy almost instantly. Despite this fact, in the USA, most whites push back against government equity initiatives…. [Read more]

Very often my goal in writing is to try to make normal things feel weird, and weird things feel normal. I try to do that because our sense of normality isn’t to be trusted: every now and then something opens ours eyes and shows us that our ‘normal’ is, well, kind of messed up. When these things happen—some social shift, a personal tragedy, an encounter with a stranger, a lesson from a teacher—we get snapped out of it, as if we’ve been asleep, and feel an urge to change things. That’s where the word ‘woke’ comes from. It’s also, while… [Read more]

Murong Xuecun is one of China’s most celebrated writers. His criticisms of China’s censorship regime led to him being silenced by the government several years ago. In April 2020, he traveled to Wuhan to discover how the people of that city were coping with the harsh Covid lockdown. It was a dangerous mission. Deadly Quiet City: Stories from Wuhan, Covid Ground Zero, based on his interviews, has just been published by Hardie Grant Books. Murong left China and is now in Australia. On 5th March, at the Adelaide Writers Festival, Murong talked about his experiences with Clive Hamilton. The transcript… [Read more]

1 I’ve often written too fast. This is partly because I didn’t start publishing short stories until my mid-thirties and have always felt a few steps behind. But it’s mostly because I’m impatient. A while ago I wrote a novel far too quickly. I decided soon after I finished a draft that it was broken beyond repair. It had some good moments, but it was a mess of ideas, inconsistencies, and confused themes. And it lacked that mysterious extra thing, that thing I suspect can only come through time and patience, that intangible, unknowable thing that can make the last… [Read more]

Why not anger? For many, the hallmark of our moment is a building sense of frustrated exasperation, a state that applies equally to the broad sweep of the public sphere as it does to the more granular intricacies of personal relations. Conversations seem more difficult than confrontations. The structural inequalities and rigidities behind so much that is simply antiquated, repressive and wrong, seem impossible to shift. The to-do list of dysfunction is growing, compounded by the unsettling fact that at the top of that pile are the very institutions charged by our society with reforming its ills. Our public politics… [Read more]

We’ve been biding our time, but on March 24, for the first time in more than two years, the Meanjin pub night returns. We’ll be presenting an evening of readings to mark the release of our Autumn edition. It’s free, and you’ll hear a talented team of writers read from their Meanjin writings. So, Melbourne folk, and others passing through, make a note: 6.30pm, Thursday March 24 Grace Darling Hotel, 114 Smith St, Collingwood You’ll hear from: Declan Fry, Yves Rees, Soon-Tzu Speechley, Wen-Juenn Lee, Alice Bishop, Arnold Zable, Fatima Measham, Ouyang Yu and Carly Stone. Hosted by Meanjin editor… [Read more]

At the end of this, the first week in March, 2022, Australians, each one of us, are facing a set of difficult circumstances. If it isn’t the aftermath of a flood, fire, death from Covid-19, destitution due to unemployment, or homelessness, then it is war in Europe, and if it isn’t a world war, it is the death of a sporting hero. Or even worse, two sporting heroes. Could we be more vulnerable, more fragile than we are, right now? And don’t we need each other, right now, more than ever? On Friday, after running errands with my partner, I… [Read more]