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

Confronting. Controversial. Unrelenting. Edgy. When The Lebs, the second and most recent novel by Michael Mohammed Ahmad, was published a year ago it was amid a flurry of these adjectives from (mostly) white reviewers and interviewers. One descriptor that did not fly so readily from their keyboards, however, was ‘coming of age’. In film and literature, a coming-of-age story is one in which the protagonist makes the transition from adolescence to early adulthood, much as Ahmad’s Bani Adam does by the end of the novel. Just why The Lebs didn’t seem to fit this bill is embedded in the pages […]

I think about Eurydice Dixon when I walk home at night. I think about her rape and murder and the conversation that emerged in the wake of it, both good and bad. ‘Unfortunately, evil acts like this do occur …’ In a press conference given by Victoria Police, this oblique platitude was the only reference to the crime. The rest of the discourse was full of the impotent pragmatism that dwells on victim’s choices—women were told to ‘take responsibility for their personal security’, exercise ‘situational awareness’ and crucially, if they had a mobile phone, be sure to ‘carry it’. Like […]

I am a good Chinese girl. To many, I will always be a good Chinese girl. Girl, because society can’t help but infantilise women. Chinese—not Malaysian Chinese, because Malaysia is just a nearby holiday destination. Not Australian, because I don’t have the right skin colour to be ‘Australian’. And good, because I am part of the model minority. Originating in America in the 1960s, the phrase ‘model minority’ was first used to describe Asian Americans during the ascension of the civil rights movement there. At that time, both phrase and myth were weaponised against the African American population in an […]

Of the few Indigenous Australian languages still spoken as a first language, Warlpiri is one of the most alive. My people have an earthy, often self-deprecating sense of humour. Their profound linguistic awareness leads them to invent hilarious jokes about their constant mispronunciation of English, and other Aboriginal languages, as well as the mispronunciation of Warlpiri by tin-eared English-speakers.

On 31 October 2017 the Australian Government officially closed down the Manus Island immigration detention centre in Lombrum and ordered PNG authorities to evict the incarcerated refugees. The detainees refused to move to another prison camp and demanded freedom. A 23-day siege began with water, food, electricity and other services discontinued or shut off. The following dialogue between Behrouz Boochani and Omid Tofighian through Whatsapp voice/text messaging communicates the anticipation and various acts of resistance leading up to the closure and the articles written and translated with urgency during that period.   17 October 2017 Behrouz: They’re going to close […]

At first glance there is not much that connects street artist Banksy, American author Thomas Pynchon, American photographer Vivian Maier and authors J.D. Salinger and Elena Ferrante. But in their own distinct ways each of these individuals are or were escape artists. They either made a deliberate attempt to avoid publicity and the limelight or simply were not interested in being interviewed or even seen in public. Fame did not interest them. But society is continually interested in them. In 2016, when Ferrante’s true identity was ‘unmasked’ by Italian journalist Claudio Gatti, a justified furore subsequently arose around the deliberate attempts […]

The Trumpster, the US President and resident of the White House, has stated on many occasions that he is going to ‘drain the swamp that is Washington’. In school-book mythology Washington and the White House were built literally in a swamp. Wetlands, such as swamps, are unhomely homely, or uncanny, places involving the return of, and to, the repressed. The uncanny as developed by Sigmund Freud in his famous essay of 1919 is the unhomely and homely that is both frightening and fascinating at the same time. In Trumpster mythology, Washington is metaphorically a swamp—whatever that means. Getting in the […]

Talk is for lovers, Merlin. I need the sword to be king. —Uther, in Excalibur Wednesday night in Hobart. I shave with a Wilkinson Sword razor, then say goodbye to my daughter. She’s on a beanbag watching Suicide Squad, which features a possessed samurai sword in a supporting role. My son and I take an Uber, and hanging from the Hyundai’s rear-vision mirror is a Sikh symbol: a double-edged straight sword, or khanda, alongside two smaller curved swords. Not long after, we arrive at St James Hall, named for James the Apostle, executed by King Herod: ‘and he killed James the […]