Can a whole country be deplatformed? That question confronts all of Australia today, as Facebook (for Facebook, read Mark Zuckerberg, who autocratically controls the social media giant) suddenly went nuclear, blocking all postings from news sites by its Australian users, and blocking those same users from seeing news postings from any source, anywhere in the world. All of this seemingly in response to a law that hasn’t even passed through Parliament. It feels like a dummy spit for the ages, the kind of moment that historians will simply chuckle over—and it is. But there’s much more here: never before in […]
What Is News, and Who Decides?
This morning, the world’s biggest media-sharing platform decided to ban all Australian news publishers, without any notice—and without applying any degree of sophistication to how a news publisher is defined. On a day where regions in Australia are experiencing flooding or extreme fire danger, Facebook has disappeared the Bureau of Meteorology—but not the climate change deniers whose evidence-ignorant actions prevent meaningful, long-term policy commitments in this area. In the middle of a pandemic, they’ve axed departments of health, and non-government community health and social services organisations, but not the anti-vaxxers whose wilful misinformation is costing lives all over the world. […]
What I’m Reading
Making sense of pain and chaos My children were returned to me when schools closed last year. At five and seven, their lives had just been uprooted in the wake of family separation, shunting them from a big block in the country with a trampoline and a treehouse, to two tiny apartments in Melbourne’s inner north. It’s fair to say that things felt uncertain, precarious and hard. At that point, I read Deborah Levy’s memoir again. The Cost of Living reflects on remaking a life in the wake of divorce. ‘The writing you are reading now is made from […]
We Got This Lockdown, Mofo
Announcement. ‘It’s only five days!’ ‘WE GOT THIS!’ Victorious Victorians! And then we go to get silly drunk, while we can, at the pub, to temper the setback, before curfew. ‘It’s only five days!’ Our mantra rings out, ‘We got THIS! Let’s bake!’ Get your shoes on, kids! It’s our family walk! With masks, around the zone, we’re permitted. We slip back in, our routine, we know it. ‘Just four more.’ We shout loud, and send out, virtual high-fives, to whoever will listen, ‘We GOT this!’ ‘NO MORE WALKING’, kids proclaim. It’s boring. How quickly, they remembered. ‘You OK?’ come […]
80 Years of Cover Art: A Meanjin Zoom Event
Join us via Zoom on Wednesday 24 February from 12pm AEDT for a one-hour panel discussion about the art of Meanjin covers from 1940 to present. Book designer and artist WH Chong, art historian Christopher Marshall, author and editor Sophie Cunningham and design expert Daniel Huppatz will talk us through the changing styles of the covers of one of Australia’s oldest literary journals, examining how they reflect the forming Australian national and artistic identity over time. The discussion is the first in a series of events commemorating Meanjin’s 80th anniversary, in conjunction with the University of Melbourne’s Archives and Special […]
Mank: The Kane Duplicity
At the beginning of F For for Fake, Orson Welles’ 1973 essay film about forgery, deception and lies, the filmmaker addresses the audience directly and sets out a thesis for what is to follow. ‘Tell it by the fireside or in a marketplace or in a movie,’ he says, ‘almost any story is almost certainly some kind of lie.’ He promises that, over the course of the next hour, he’s going to give them the unvarnished truth. David Fincher’s Mank is based on one Hollywood’s most discredited fictions: the idea that screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz was the real genius behind Citizen Kane and that Welles’ […]
What I’m Reading
Lately, people in my life keep asking me: ‘Do you read fiction at all? Or do you just read memoir?’ The first time I’m asked the question, I smile. ‘Of course I read fiction,’ I reply. ‘Don’t you remember me posting Instagram stories about being obsessed with Laura McPhee-Browne’s Cherry Beach and Vivian Pham’s The Coconut Children during lockdown?’ When I am asked the question again by someone else, at a post-lockdown brunch, I give a vague response but am disquieted by it. Later, I check my book-tracking app. Sure enough, I haven’t been reading many novels. I add about […]
What if We Never Recover?
It is the beginning of summer. It is hot but windy, as so many summer days are in London. It is that strange period between the first and second national lockdowns. COVID-19 cases are not as ubiquitous as they were in the spring, but they’re on the rise again, and no-one is paying any attention. It is 6am and I wake up with a start at my partner’s house. I lurch forward in bed and try my best to catch all the vomit in my mouth before it escapes onto his duvet. I run to the bathroom, only I limp, […]
Meanjin Daily Reading: Back for 2021
We’re delighted to let you know that our daily reading email newsletter is back for 2021, starting next Monday, February 8. Sign up (if you haven’t already) and you can expect a fresh piece from of Meanjin’s rich 80-year archive in your inbox every weekday morning. A gift of words for your day.
What I’m Reading
The last book launch I went to before the pandemic was for Ellena Savage’s excellent Blueberries. This is also the last book I can clearly remember reading. Earlier today, I opened the notebook where I recorded the titles I read in 2020. After Blueberries was Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen Trilogy; Jenny Offill’s Weather; and Tara June Winch’s The Yield. After that, Svetlana Alexievich’s brilliant Voices from Chernobyl. Then nothing. I remember reading Voices from Chernobyl slowly. At the time, I thought it was because it was such a harrowing book that I was inadvertently pacing myself. Now I suspect that it […]
Where Your Cabaret Comes From
November 1996, Kooky down at Club 77. I’d been away for almost a year. John Howard had been elected and a pall had drawn over. Groovii Biscuit did a drag performance in a three-piece suit with big messy eyebrows and clunky glasses. The song was ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, spliced with soundbites of Howard. Behind Groovii/ Howard was a map of Australia covered in stickers of Aboriginal flags and trees. S/he pulled off the flags and threw them to the ground. S/he pulled off the trees and threw them to the ground. Across the middle and top of the continent, […]
What I’m Reading
The New True Crime: a case for empathy over voyeurism …the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world. – Edgar Allan Poe I am swimming in a deep dark sea of terrible stories. I’ve been doing a deep dive into true crime and 2020 has found me buried in books, physical and virtual, plus essays, journalism and podcasts (so many podcasts). Bound up in brutality, violence and other people’s trauma, I’m beginning to wonder: what are the consequences of immersing in a genre obsessed with dead women and girls? \\ […]
