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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

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And many nations will pass by this city, and every man will say to his neighbour, ‘Why has the Lord dealt thus with this great city?’ And they will answer, ‘Because they have forsaken the covenant of the Lord their God and worshiped other gods and served them.’ Weep not for him who is dead, nor grieve for him, but weep bitterly for him who goes away, for he shall return no more to see his native land. —Jeremiah 22:8–10 Here We Are For a political movement sustained by traditional values, the past year for Australian conservatives has seen, inter […]

At last I’m here. It’s three o’clock on an autumn afternoon drenched in sun like eucalypt resin. Sitting under the arch of Natural Bridge, I watch Cave Creek tumble through a hole in the rock ceiling and waterfall over a log that must have washed down years ago. The water’s pressure has carved and smoothed the wood with such regular precision it looks braided: it might be a piece of civic art painstakingly fashioned by human hands. I puzzle over how I can tell it’s not. Something ‘artless’ about the angle: some ineffable quality, retained by the log in the stream, […]

Australia still clings to the idea that we are all equal and a house is within arm’s reach.

How the Shift of Wealth to Women Will Change Everything from Education to the Environment It was in 1984 that Cindy Lauper sang ‘Money, money changes everything.’ Perhaps she sang with such conviction because she knew it to be true. At 17 she had already left home and was living in a cockroach-infested apartment with drug-dealer neighbours. She hitch-hiked, occasionally stole clothes for herself and her sister and at times had no food, her boyfriend presenting a squirrel for dinner that he had shot. When Lauper sang, a new generation of women listened. Previous generations had already been propelled into […]

  In 2017 we were compelled to have a national survey about same-sex marriage as if we were a nation undecided. We were not. We were represented as a nation deeply troubled by the non-binary nature of sex: we are not. Gender has refused to be binary no matter what we have thrown at it. Patriarchy has given it everything it has—it is spent. When it was all over and done with, the lower classes and the Muslims were blamed for the no vote. Powerful and affluent white Australia conceived, rendered the contours and made vivid the messaging of the […]

1 Like Arthur Rimbaud, who imagined himself a drunken boat sailing the world to escape the tedium of provincial France, the painter Dušan Marek took vast oceans and bubbling surf as subjects for his art before ever setting eyes on the sea. In particular, a painting titled The Voyage, made on the slat of a wooden bunk Marek slept in during five months of internment at a refugee camp in Dillenberg, Germany, is an imaginative study of water and waves. Read from left to right, argues Bernice Murphy, author of one of two monographs on the artist, the painting’s subject […]

There are two schools of thought regarding satire in 2018: it’s either a golden age for satirists because the increasingly absurd political landscape gives them plenty of material; or it’s a terrible time to be a satirist, because the increasingly absurd political landscape makes it impossible to invent anything more ridiculous than reality. For example, Donald Trump supplies prime fodder for the world’s comedians on a daily basis, but then what’s the point of trying to make Trump look stupid when he does such a good job himself? The question is whether writing satire in the present day is akin […]