Sunday, noon: I’m sitting with friends beneath a huge old mulberry tree, its green providing us with shade. The suffocating haze of bushfire smoke which had been blanketing Sydney is mercifully absent, enabling this picturesque moment: a Christmas lunch between three couples, one with a newborn, the other with a baby only a year old lolling about on the grass, and lastly, myself and my partner. They’re all eating ham, I’m eating lamb cooked apart. My phone buzzes, and I look down at an email from a stranger titled ‘Head in the Sand’, accusing myself and all Arab Muslims of […]

It’s been another big year at Meanjin—around 200 pieces were published in print (and hundreds more here on the blog). It’s been a year of fine writing in essay, fiction, memoir and poetry. We wanted to pick a small selection just to give you a taste of the work that fills these pages. You can always browse the site for more.   Essays Overcooked by Paul Daley Unearthed: Last Days of the Anthropocene by James Bradley Queer and Now: The Trouble with Gender Identity by Adolfo Aranjuez This Woman is Hysterical: On Sickness and Sanity by Fiona Wright Black and White […]

It’s only mid-December, and already Christmas has made me cry. The ‘tree’ I bought a few years ago is charming—plain wood and Scandinavian-style. In my head, I imagined it hung with a few beautiful, simple paper decorations. Perhaps folded origami cranes in different colours. Elegant, I thought. My daughters, Kitty, 6, and Elsa, 9, begged for tinsel. For baubles. And so, because Christmas is about kids, I acquiesced. Once the tree was decorated a few days ago, Elsa declared for perhaps the eighth time in half an hour: ‘I HATE our tree. It’s so ugly. Can’t we go to Kmart […]

In his final campaign in 1951, the Labour Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, concluded his speech to the Labour conference by quoting from the poet William Blake’s Jerusalem:

A lot of commentators were keen to make comparisons between this British general election and the last one in 2017 and they were right to do so—to an extent. Brexit overshadowed both. All three parties, the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats struggled with its meaning and will continue to do so. At the heart of Brexit is a paradox. The Leave vote to take back control meant handing it back to a political class that wanted no such thing. Everyone says politics is about gaining power, but in the 2016 referendum all the parties in Westminster, except the small […]

In the early 1980’s when I was a reporter with SBS, I interviewed a notorious racist. Jack Van Tongeren was running for the Senate in Western Australia, and I spent an exhausting and depressing half hour in his living room, questioning and challenging him on his odious views about the evils of Asian immigration and other subjects. Ultimately, after a lot of thought and debate, we decided not to broadcast any part of the interview. We decided we would be more likely to provide free publicity for his campaign than expose it for the arrant nonsense it was. Several years […]

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 […]