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

When contemplating the historical efficacy of this nation’s secular shrine, the Australian War Memorial, it is best to stand out front in the middle of Anzac Parade, look up towards Mount Ainslie and imagine what was originally intended.

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 November 2018, the Icelandic composer and ‘multi-instrumentalist’ Ólafur Arnalds walked onstage at Canberra Theatre and offered his first impression of the city before a packed house. ‘As we landed in your elusive capital,’ he began…

‘If you want to say something in anger they won’t listen to you,’ said Lawford-Wolf, who originally trained as a dancer with the Aboriginal Islander Dance Theatre before performing with Bangarra Dance Theatre, in an interview in 1995. ‘So you’ve got to learn to be diplomatic, to learn to change it all around, to do it in their little syrupy way … I’ve managed to perfect that.’

A young black man dances unapologetically. It is 11 pm at The Workers Club in Fitzroy and Ziggy Ramo, hip-hop artist, is performing his latest single, Pretty Boy. Learn to love your own skin So sexy when you sink in, sink in You’re too pretty not to love yourself As the beat approaches he leaps onto one foot. Does anyone like to dance, Melbourne? Cause this black man loves to dance. His movement is joyous. The back of his jacket reads Ziggy Ramo, The Love. A red heart sits islanded between each of the words. Above: Ziggy Ramo. ♥ Below: The Love. […]

I am a migrant on stolen land—this I cannot escape, this I don’t want resolved. To understand my family’s move to safety as the displacement of others is a lifelong project. I am not in the market for fantasies of innocence, I studied history. Giving up the idea that I am on the margins though—that’s hard.

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

I joined the public service in the mid 1960s. The purpose of this essay is to review and reflect upon the changes that have taken place since in the way we are governed, and to hazard some thoughts about whether the way we are governed now is fit to meet the challenges we face. The story that emerges is one of governments wrestling with the relationship between government and the public service, especially the relationships between ministers and their department heads, the services to be provided to ministers to enable them to discharge their ministerial functions, and the relationships between […]

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

In her 2015 Sydney Review of Books article ‘What the essayist spills’, Maria Tumarkin draws a clear distinction between ‘confessor’ and ‘essayist’. The first is a writer who spills everything for an audience primed to receive and ‘learn’ from it. The latter sees their material as an entry to wider discussions; ‘smashing the bottom from underneath the author’s experiences’ and steering…

Every now and then, perhaps every few weeks, I end up asking how you feel about time. It baffles you, this strange question—it baffles me too. Perhaps that’s why I keep asking you—maybe it’s not that I’m searching for an answer that I cannot find, it’s that I don’t want to be alone in my confusion. It feels as if the past decade, but particularly this year, time has receded in a tide, never to break back on land. I don’t know where I’ve been.