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

In July 2019, Avengers: Endgame became the highest-grossing film of all time, yet another indicator of the extraordinary and ongoing cultural dominance of comics.[1] The so-called Marvel Cinematic Universe, to which Avengers belongs, encompasses no fewer than 23 movies, eight of which have amassed more than a billion dollars each in ticket sales. Symptomatically, when the studio announced its release schedule for years to come (the so-called ‘Phase Four plan’) it did so at San Diego Comic-Con International, an event founded in 1970 as the much more humble ‘Golden State Comic Book Convention’.[2] Like the superheroes they often portray, comic […]

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

Let me state it plainly: the desire for balance and the desperate need of journalists to appear neutral will be the death of us.

Google has this handy and terrifying feature called Timeline, which shows you everywhere you’ve ever been, how many times you’ve been there, and how long you’ve been there each time. It collects data from your phone, constantly if you have an Android, and if you have an iPhone, it logs your location every time you open the Google Maps app. Nothing disappears: your every movement is a collection of data points, fed into algorithms that use this information to do everything from alert you to traffic jams in your area to notify you when you’re running low on nappies for your […]

The end of a jetty is a nowhere place; no longer on land but not quite at sea. With a glance in the right direction, even time vanishes. Is that a ship on the horizon? White sails catching the winds. Matthew Flinders on deck, scanning distant land. There’s a whiff of smoke blending with the aroma of salty air. Looking back towards the shore, shadowy figures cook fish in coals, while children search rock pools for mussels. Imagination runs wild in nowhere places.

About a third of the way through her essay ‘Three Sisters’, Janet Malcolm describes the mysterious allure of bookshops and declares, ‘the association of books with humanistic ideals is deeply entrenched in the public imagination and finds its way into the rueful articles that regularly appear throughout the world, whose own subliminal message is that books are a kind of last bastion against barbarity’. She’s writing here about a bookshop in New York run by a trio of sisters engaged in the funny business of selling antiquarian literature. It’s a safe enough proposition to say Malcolm knows a lot about […]

Jen’s voice had that urgent, excited tone she gets sometimes. ‘I think you should come over to Aunty Bet’s place, guys. I really think you should see this.’ It was summer, 2015. Our friend Jen Saunders’ aunt had recently moved to an aged care place over in Carlton, entrusting her niece to sort things out at the house on Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne. ‘While you’re here,’ Jen said, ‘you can help me pick some plums. Then I’ll show you around. My God!’ A solitary wizened plum tree stood at the bottom of the garden, a long bare rectangle of mown grass […]

Art speaks to its moment, and our own. We rummage through familiar plays and books, images and songs, apparently secure in our understanding. Then the times shift ever so slightly and new readings appear. The prospect of Donald Trump as president of the United States sent literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt back to the texts of Shakespeare, thinking again about characters that seemed settled. Suddenly for Greenblatt the texts demanded a new urgency. What could we learn about power from Richard III or from other tyrants in Shakespeare’s cast? They teach of cruelty, of the cynicism of authority in dangerous hands. Revisiting […]

‘It’s the hinge that squeaks that gets the grease.’ —Malcolm X   Sand nigger. I was 15 years old the first time I heard this racial slur. An Aussie with long brown hair and pasty white skin, who was drunk, screamed at me from across the road while I was walking to the local manoush shop for breakfast. It was December 2001 and I was studying at Punchbowl Boys High School—a scrawny second-gen Leb growing up in the ethno-slums of Sydney. Three months earlier, two airplanes hijacked by Muslim terrorists had crashed into the World Trade Centre. Twelve months earlier, Australian […]

Last Days of the Anthropocene Last summer started early in Australia. In November a heatwave struck northern Queensland, pushing temperatures to record heights in many places. In Cairns the temperature reached 42.6 degrees, more than five degrees higher than the previous record for November. Over 12 days fire crews attended more than 1200 fires, including devastating blazes in rainforest areas that had always been regarded as natural firebreaks. In parts of Queensland, fire conditions were designated catastrophic, the first time the rating—which was only created in 2009—had been used in the state. November’s record temperatures in Queensland were only the […]