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 […]
The Tory Restoration
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:
Unfinished Business
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 […]
A Partiality For The Truth
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 […]
What I’m Reading
‘This isn’t a novel, this is a film. A film is life.’ Weekend (1967), Jean-Luc Godard ‘I started to think that maybe there are times when mystery is more important than knowledge.’ ‘The Mystery Box’ (2007), J. J. Abrams ‘How Can We Finish a Book, a Dream? … What happens at the end of a text?’ Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing (1993), Hélène Cixous Last night I dreamt I was touring with a vaporwave[1] musician. In the dream, I was a VJ, or more specifically my job/reason for being on this tour was to perform […]
What I’m Reading
My father taught me how to read English long before any schoolteacher could. While I was too young to remember the process and how it was that I came to read, my mother tells me that most days during my toddler years Dad would prop me up on his thigh, and with newspaper in hand, he’d point to the various newspaper headlines; slowly reading both letters and words aloud, before encouraging me to echo his voice and actions. I can imagine my father’s Black hand and his utilitarian index finger pointing to the bold letters on the crisp and creamy […]
What We Fight About When We Fight About Cinema
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 […]
How Menzies Begged Macmillan For The Bomb
Nearly sixty years ago Sir Robert Menzies, Leader of the Liberal Party and Prime Minister of Australia, was trying to do a secret deal with his British counterpart, Harold Macmillan, for the supply of nuclear weapons to Australia, a deal he was keen to see done before the treaty banning atmospheric nuclear tests came into effect. A formerly Top Secret file has been lying on the open shelves of the UK Public Records Office and now its National Archives since 1993. Labelled Nuclear Capability in Australia it opens with a letter from Prime Minister Robert Menzies to his British counterpart, […]
Meanjin Pub Night: Join Us
It’s the end of a big, big year, in words and ideas…climate change, gender, race, citizenship, sexuality, freedom…they all have people talking and writers writing. Ward off the end of 2019 days…Join us for a night of readings from some of the brightest voices in Australian writing. You’ll hear from Meanjin authors: Adolfo Aranjuez Alice Bishop Harry Saddler Belinda Rule Maja Amanita Khalid Warsame Guy Rundle Shu-Ling Chua Madison Griffiths Prithvi Varatharajan Hollen Singleton Fatima Measham Raise a glass… and maybe even buy a magazine! When: Thursday December 12, 2019, 7 – 9pm Where: The Union Club Hotel, Fitzroy Click […]
Our Cities and the Profits of Expulsion
I don’t live in the city. I grew up there but I moved when I could to a town not too far from a regional train station, but still far enough removed to not see any neighbours from my kitchen window. I revel in this, in the quiet. In our overcrowding world, it’s a luxury. I commute to work, to the university, and I live the city in these trips, just like I did when I was younger. I live the congestion, the damp heat on crowded trams, the muffled skies, the brisk looking-through one another, the sometimes startling exchange. […]
December Editorial: OverCooked
THURSDAY, 19th. In the P.M. had fresh Gales at South-South-West and Cloudy Squally weather, with a large Southerly Sea; at 6 took in the Topsails, and at 1 A.M. brought too and Sounded, but had no ground with 130 fathoms of line. At 5, set the Topsails close reef’d, and at 6, saw land extending from North-East to West, distance 5 or 6 Leagues, having 80 fathoms, fine sandy bottom. We continued standing to the Westward with the Wind at South-South-West until 8, at which time we got Topgallant Yards a Cross, made all sail, and bore away along shore North-East for the […]
What I’m Reading
‘The [Lockean] premise that as embodied persons we possess ourselves.’ ‘We can work “it”, we can neglect “it”, because “it” is ours to control.’ —Ed Cohen, ‘A Body Worth Having’. I told the student dentist about my tooth hurting and my strategies for eating. He told me he could see me in 2020, or I could go to Emergency and wait for a day, or two, and pay an unspecified amount. –I’m going to Vietnam, I said. I told him the plan, the one that I had made before Public Dental called me and let me in. I told […]
