In a 2016 Meanjin essay one of this country’s most celebrated writers, Alexis Wright, asked us a fundamental question in relation to storytelling and the role of the writer. ‘What happens when you tell somebody else’s story?’ she asked, in a thoughtful piece of writing that did not demand that white Australia not engage with the story of Aboriginal people (as some have concluded). In addressing the question, Wright asked of each of us, Aboriginal and ‘settler’ both, that we give deeper consideration to the act of telling stories and take greater responsibility for the decisions we make as writers. […]

Last year was a gruelling one in Australian politics. The despair of the representative class was sometimes sufficient to brim, then spill from the parliamentary precinct.

I live within walking distance of the West Gate Bridge, I have for most of my life (or most of its life, since I was born before the bridge was built). I moved away for a few years in my twenties to live in a series of inner-city share houses and to travel, but I came back in the mid 1980s and have lived in Yarraville ever since. I see the bridge most days, usually several times a day. It is one of my Melbourne landmarks—like the Yarra and the Maribyrnong rivers, like the Eureka Towers, and the spire of […]

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By now, I’ve lived in Australia for roughly half the time I’ve lived at all. Three decades is significant. Three is the number of sides in a triangle, a shape that, for millennia, has so fascinated our species. Three is a holy number—the Christian Trinity, the Hindu Trimurti, Wicca’s Triple Goddesses. Halves have always been significant, too—binaries more so. Man, woman. Human, world. Soul, body. Right, wrong. In his Symposium, Plato imagines proto-humans as Franken-beings with two faces, eight limbs and two sets of genitals, bisected by wrathful gods and doomed forever to search for their ‘other half’. Some months […]

Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $80 for print or $50 for digital. DIGITAL PRINT

Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $80 for print or $50 for digital. DIGITAL PRINT

Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $80 for print or $50 for digital. DIGITAL PRINT

Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $80 for print or $50 for digital. DIGITAL PRINT

The most significant idea that John Howard has contributed to our understanding of liberalism in Australia has been his characterisation of the Liberal Party of Australia as a ‘broad church’ comprised of liberals and conservatives. According to Howard, it contains those who look back to John Stuart Mill and those who trace their political ideas to Edmund Burke. The broad church is a metaphor taken from the ecclesiastical realm, and in particular from the history of the Church of England. In the wake of the religious conflicts of the seventeenth century the church attempted to be as comprehensive as possible, […]

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The announcement of a grant of half a billion dollars to the Australian War Memorial for a massive program of extensions has reignited the long-smouldering controversy about frontier conflict. Despite criticism reaching back many years the memorial has steadfastly refused to admit Aboriginal warriors into the shrine, which director Brendan Nelson calls the soul of the nation. His excuse is that the relevant legislation prohibits such an innovation. This has always been a debatable assertion and rather misses the point. If Dr Nelson wanted to embrace frontier conflict he could ask for a minor amendment to the legislation, which could be […]