Livo is dipped in a vat of Aeroplane Orange Mango jelly. The sky between the high-rise apartments housing yups coming in from the east and the little businesses owned by ‘the ethnics’ is orange. I have a good view of it all. I work on the fifth floor of an office building near the library and I sit right near metre-long glass windows. In the office, I have to use words like ‘ethnic’, ‘diverse’ and ‘multicultural communities’ just to keep my job, even if those words just lump poor brown people together and capitalise on brownness. But when I’m out […]
The Burning
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 […]
James Mollison (1931 – 2020)
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 […]
The Best Writing on Bushfires and Climate
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 […]
Do Men Need To See Little Women?
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 […]
The Unlearned Country
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 […]
Who Sold Blue Poles to Australia?
In September 1973 the sale of Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles to the National Gallery of Australia for US$2,000,000 was announced—the highest price at the time for any contemporary American painting. Its American owner Ben Heller, then in his nineties, told me in a telephone interview that he ‘got an approach for Blue Poles’ from Max Hutchinson, an Australian art dealer in New York. The National Gallery of Australia says on its website ‘In May 1973, (director-designate James) Mollison received a letter from art dealer Max Hutchinson, casually [emphasis added] mentioning Blue poles was for sale.’ A few weeks after the sale a […]
What I’m Reading
Recently I had a conversation about depression and killing time: what it looks like now, in the age of the internet and all its fringe benefits. When I want to kill time I become so concerned with the how that I plunge headlong into a gluey kind of idle that is self-aware, that manifests as: hours sitting cross-legged at the foot of my bed, looking at the wall and holding onto a book like a toddler and their one soggy corn flake. I am weighing out the most efficient way to do nothing. Recently I had a conversation about depression […]
What I’m Reading
When my American partner is overseas, her side of the bed tends to become a bureau, an odds-and-ends bowl, and a library (sometimes also a snack cupboard). Books press against me like a body pillow, not because it’s comfortable, but because my reading habits change. They keep stranger and longer hours. They ask for greater, perhaps distracting discontinuity between genres and styles and narratives. They ask, in short, for a lot of courtesies, unsustainable courtesies, and I grant them. Omar Sakr’s first poetry collection, These Wild Houses, impressed me with the range and vulnerability of its lyric voice—at times prophetic, […]
Head in the Sand
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 […]
What I’m Reading
I DON’T READ MUCH. A friend sent me a book SO MUCH LONGING IN SO LITTLE SPACE The Art of Edvard Munch Knausgaard (the writer) says… ‘Munch was around 50 years old when he painted the cabbage field. There is a longing in this painting…a longing to disappear and become one with the world’. I got to page 35, I passed the pain barrier, in other words, I’m hooked. A friend sent me HEIDE Pi.O. Pi.O. is a legendary figure in the Australian poetry scene. He was born in Greece and brought up in Fitzroy. I met Pi.O. at a […]
2019 in Meanjin: A Taste
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 […]
