When a person is aware that their photo is being taken, posing invariably ensues. It might be duck lips or a jutted hip or the V-sign, but rarely does the observed camera capture something completely natural. The photo that was released following the PM’s signing of Prince Philip’s condolence book was staged. This wasn’t a paparazzi photo taken through a window or some surreptitious, staffer-taken snapshot. This image—that had his wife posed behind him, her hands clasped solemnly behind her back—was the image selected to tell the tale of Australia’s commiserations. Instead of focusing on why so many of us […]
What I’m Reading
For as long as I can remember, my reading material has formed a kind of orbit around me. Every time I read a new sentence, particularly when the book is good, and it’s good surprisingly often, it feels like a re-negotiation of the world. My reading matter tends to be multi-genred and multi-modal. I like to surround myself with different types of texts, so it would be normally an audiobook on the way to work, some poetry on the bedside table, and a novel or two by the sofa. I will immerse myself in both poetry and fiction most evenings […]
Upcoming Event: Unpacking the Cultural Cringe
Join us at the University of Melbourne on Monday 26th April for a one-hour panel discussion surrounding the idea of cultural cringe. The concept was brought to life in a 1950 Meanjin essay by A A Phillips, who despaired of Australian cultural genuflection towards the British. To what cultures does contemporary Australia cringe, and for what reasons? What is the role of a literary culture in emboldening the national conversation? Meanjin editor Jonathan Green will host a panel of writers, thinkers and commentators who will explore Meanjin’s part in an exploration of an Australian cultural identity. This is the second […]
What I’m Reading
I didn’t move to Mexico to fall in love. It happened, as love does, unexpectedly. Prior to meeting my partner, I knew that I would have to pick up my long-lost Spanish where I had left it more than 15 years ago: on bits of scrap paper, my homework written hastily in between classes and hangovers while I was studying at the University of Sydney. Learning Spanish all those years ago was a lesson in what not to do, I mumbled to myself when I took the mandatory entry exam to restart my learning. If I was going to live […]
What I’m Reading
The future is now When my brother left home in the 90s for the blinking lights of the IT boom, he gifted me something. I’d grown up with his penchant for sci-fi and intense 70s prog, but this was new: a space man called David Bowie. Unlike Freddy Mercury, who I wanted to marry, I didn’t want to be with Bowie: I wanted to be Bowie. Or, no, it’s more psychological than that. Our dad had died just before I was born and my 12-year-old brain pretty much slotted Bowie in as a vague approximation. I had, after all, grown […]
In Marginalia
The casual references to eugenics laced throughout research about deafness didn’t stop me from trawling through scientific databases. Every so often, there was a direct quote from a research subject. As they described their deaf body, their Deaf life, I couldn’t help writing in the margins—Yes! Yes! I feel this too! ‘I don’t want to be labelled…’ said one subject. ‘I don’t want people to be like, that’s the deaf girl. I don’t want to have that label. I want people to see me apart from that.’ When asked would she take ‘normal’ hearing if it were ‘magically offered’ to […]
Holiday Reading
I spent the past weeks convinced that my task for Meanjin was to respond to the subject of holiday reading, instead of writing my own entry to their ‘What I’m Reading’ series, so I am honouring my misunderstanding. Apologies! Holiday reading exists in a category of its own. Come November, recommendations appear in magazines, lift-outs and special columns, online and offline, the titles largely drawn from a narrow range of publishers and genres—thriller, crime, adventure, historical fiction… The promise of holiday reading is immersion and/or diversion, a suspension of the ordinary, an escape from that other real life we lead […]
Love Letter to a Book
In 2019, I was invited to present a love letter to a book at the Melbourne Writers Festival. Nawal El Saadawi’s seminal creative non-fiction book, Woman at Point Zero, edged out any competition. No other book I have read, which centres a flawed but authentic heroine, has affected me as deeply, a fact that played into my own understanding of how we talk about women, their issues and the cultural differences that influence how these manifest. I cannot dilute the significance of the book’s exploration of an Arab woman’s life. This is a book that did not just point out […]
What I’m Reading
Reading American Literature Readying myself for isolation during the Great Pandemic of 2020, I naturally went to my local bookstore to stockpile necessities, had a heavy discussion with one of the sellers about finally making time to reread old favourites. He named the Russians and I said Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, having secretly claimed African American literature a birthright since leaving my home in the United States twenty-one years ago, my skin white like spaces between the words that have consistently taught me right from wrong. I remember being twelve, newly bleeding. It’s near-to summer and the scent of magnolia […]
Upcoming Zoom Conversation: Letters to the Editor
On Wednesday 24 March, join Meanjin editor Jonathan Green and historian, author and former Meanjin editor Jim Davidson as they discuss ‘Letters to the Editor’—a reflection on correspondence from the University’s archival collection, piecing together a portrait of Meanjin’s founding editor, Clem Christesen. This free one-hour Zoom event will commence at 12pm AEDT. This is the second in of a series of events that are a collaboration between the University’s Archives and Special Collections and Meanjin to celebrate our 80th year. Click here to register for the event. About the pannelists: Meanjin editor Jonathan Green has been an editor, writer, commentator and broadcaster in a 40-year career as a journalist, beginning with a […]
What I’m Reading
A Burns Philp general store was my childhood gateway to the world. My parents were based in Kavieng, the main town on the island of New Ireland in Papua New Guinea. The general store commandeered the main street, providing expatriates with some basic comforts from overseas. It was also the only place on the island that stocked books. Amongst the jumble of shelves displaying canned food, processed cheese and tins of powdered milk, was a solitary, somewhat lopsided, arrangement of idiosyncratic titles. Restocking of this shelf was haphazard. But whenever it was replenished, I pleaded with Mum to spend a […]
The Mad That I Feel
‘What do you do with the mad that you feel?’ So asked beloved children’s entertainer Fred Rogers, whose show Mr Rogers’ Neighborhood screened on public television in America for almost four decades. I’ve been thinking about this question a lot in recent weeks, since Brittany Higgins so bravely spoke out about the rape she alleges a colleague perpetrated against her in Federal Parliament, only to be met by the all too predictable level of victim blaming meted out against women who come forward; since Chanel Contos launched a petition to codify the teaching of sexual consent in the school system, […]
