Was the interest in my work explicitly linked to my identity? Were they looking for the next successful blak book?

Somewhere before White Fragility became the lingo du jour of anti-racism workshops, white people stopped telling me out loud that they were ‘one of the good ones’. They chuckled and said ‘Oh, I’m so white’. They offered me a conspiring wink. It’s not as suave when I reciprocate. I can only blink, or hold my hand over one eye like an optometrist, testing just what it is I’m meant to be seeing.

Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $100 for a print subscription, $5 for a monthly digital subscription, and $50 for an annual digital subscription. DIGITAL PRINT

A building with a cross on top, what is that? It’s a gathering place where decent, wholesome people come together and they share values protected by that American flag. It could be said that that beautiful building flanked by those arches signifies more or less the same thing. —Ray Kroc, The Founder (2016) I can’t remember the first time I entered a McDonald’s. In the same way that I can’t remember my first Lego set, or exactly when the jingle for Lube Mobile was burned into my subconscious, it exists as a cultural behemoth hazily rooted in the mythology of […]

The potter gives me a giant vessel. Pocked and the colour of red-gum trunks in late spring, it’s heavy like a four-year-old child. I take it home on the train in one of those tough reusable supermarket bags, straining at the handles. I cut off branches of hop bush, their seeds like pendants rusted at the tips, and place them in the vessel. Slender leaves reach out like a million small fingers. It takes a dozen jugfuls of water to fill it. I count them. The next day he sends me a text with a paragraph taken from Joan Didion’s […]

Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $100 for a print subscription, $5 for a monthly digital subscription, and $50 for an annual digital subscription. DIGITAL PRINT

Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $100 for a print subscription, $5 for a monthly digital subscription, and $50 for an annual digital subscription. DIGITAL PRINT

Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $100 for a print subscription, $5 for a monthly digital subscription, and $50 for an annual digital subscription. DIGITAL PRINT

Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $100 for a print subscription, $5 for a monthly digital subscription, and $50 for an annual digital subscription. DIGITAL PRINT

Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $100 for a print subscription, $5 for a monthly digital subscription, and $50 for an annual digital subscription. DIGITAL PRINT

Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $100 for a print subscription, $5 for a monthly digital subscription, and $50 for an annual digital subscription. DIGITAL PRINT

On a wet and squally September day in Sydney, being greeted by Deborah Mailman is a tonic. Wearing reading spectacles and a black tracksuit top with white stripes, she steps away from her laptop in this ABC office to smile radiantly with both arms extended for a handshake. Then she throws her head back, claps her hands and laughs when I recite her salty dialogue as a senator in Total Control, the stormy political television drama series directed by Rachel Perkins. ‘I know you fought my appointment, you two-faced slimy fuck,’ says Senator Alex Irving on the phone in a […]