In a 2016 Meanjin essay one of this country’s most celebrated writers, Alexis Wright, asked us a fundamental question in relation to storytelling and the role of the writer. ‘What happens when you tell somebody else’s story?’ she asked, in a thoughtful piece of writing that did not demand that white Australia not engage with the story of Aboriginal people (as some have concluded). In addressing the question, Wright asked of each of us, Aboriginal and ‘settler’ both, that we give deeper consideration to the act of telling stories and take greater responsibility for the decisions we make as writers. […]

Last year was a gruelling one in Australian politics. The despair of the representative class was sometimes sufficient to brim, then spill from the parliamentary precinct.

I live within walking distance of the West Gate Bridge, I have for most of my life (or most of its life, since I was born before the bridge was built). I moved away for a few years in my twenties to live in a series of inner-city share houses and to travel, but I came back in the mid 1980s and have lived in Yarraville ever since. I see the bridge most days, usually several times a day. It is one of my Melbourne landmarks—like the Yarra and the Maribyrnong rivers, like the Eureka Towers, and the spire of […]

The women wore gowns, furs and jewels. One even had a tiara. The men’s formal evening wear verged on the dashing, all black ties, sashes and medals. And when it came to the speech to launch the celebration of Australian art and culture, it was a strangely apologetic Victorian governor, Sir Dallas Brooks, who stood in front of a large group of international Olympic officials, local VIPs and a smattering of city council officials. ‘Our national treasures have not been brought forward in any spirit of boastfulness. We simply offer the best we have,’ he said. It was Saturday evening, […]

By now, I’ve lived in Australia for roughly half the time I’ve lived at all. Three decades is significant. Three is the number of sides in a triangle, a shape that, for millennia, has so fascinated our species. Three is a holy number—the Christian Trinity, the Hindu Trimurti, Wicca’s Triple Goddesses. Halves have always been significant, too—binaries more so. Man, woman. Human, world. Soul, body. Right, wrong. In his Symposium, Plato imagines proto-humans as Franken-beings with two faces, eight limbs and two sets of genitals, bisected by wrathful gods and doomed forever to search for their ‘other half’. Some months […]

I’ve heard of that place, Australia. There are even some memories that persist of it as a discrete, identifiable object. It was a thing taught to me in primary school in jovial, unambiguous ways. It was a series of tales of sheep, and rushes of gold, and the bushranging bloke with a metal bucket on his head. It played cricket against the West Indies. It was precisely 200 years old and we dressed as convicts and walked down the town’s main street to celebrate this fact. All incompleteness and lies that I felt disconnected from then, as I do now. […]

I’m against purity; let that be made clear from the beginning. It’s a hydra-headed monster with many forms, most of them destructive and divisive. In some forms it has caused the violent deaths of tens of millions of people, in others it has caused long-lasting psychological damage. It could be the single greatest cause of evil in the world. It can also be breathtakingly beautiful. Anyone who has seen snow fall in a junkyard will know how beautiful purity can be. As pure as the driven snow. The glittering whiteness transforms disorder—car engines, drums, garbage bags—into clean, clear shapes wherein each […]

Whatever else it is, reading is surely one of the central activities and interests of literature. Literature, though, is hardly a central activity or interest in contemporary culture. So it seems odd that readers of Gerald Murnane who are also critics or reviewers like to point to the author’s eccentricities: he has never worn sunglasses, for example; he’s reclusive, never flown on a plane and doesn’t like to travel; he never watches films, doesn’t like the sea, and, among other things, he’s obsessed with horse racing, keeping colour-coded files on races, horses and jockeys that can be recalled or retrieved […]

Wake in Fright was published in 1961, more than 50 years ago. Australia, many assume, has come a long way since then. Yet Kenneth Cook’s masterpiece, the novel by which he is still best known and that has hardly ever been out of print, is timeless. The forces that plunge hapless schoolteacher John Grant into a spiral of alcoholic despair—lack of money, desperation, the heat and the alien nature of the landscape—remain menacingly relevant. When Ken wrote Wake in Fright, he was a 30-year-old ABC journalist with a wife and four children. He was also the author of a novel […]

The most significant idea that John Howard has contributed to our understanding of liberalism in Australia has been his characterisation of the Liberal Party of Australia as a ‘broad church’ comprised of liberals and conservatives. According to Howard, it contains those who look back to John Stuart Mill and those who trace their political ideas to Edmund Burke. The broad church is a metaphor taken from the ecclesiastical realm, and in particular from the history of the Church of England. In the wake of the religious conflicts of the seventeenth century the church attempted to be as comprehensive as possible, […]

My first book was yellow. On its cover was a bumblebee and the words ‘All the best things in the world begin with a b.’ I look at the words, and the words make sense, and suddenly the book springs into story. All these years later I can open that book’s hard yellow covers and I am six years old, alone at night, and making a discovery that will mean I am never alone again. There is a boy, there is a butterfly, thand there is a bumblebee. They all begin with a b, they are all found in the […]

The announcement of a grant of half a billion dollars to the Australian War Memorial for a massive program of extensions has reignited the long-smouldering controversy about frontier conflict. Despite criticism reaching back many years the memorial has steadfastly refused to admit Aboriginal warriors into the shrine, which director Brendan Nelson calls the soul of the nation. His excuse is that the relevant legislation prohibits such an innovation. This has always been a debatable assertion and rather misses the point. If Dr Nelson wanted to embrace frontier conflict he could ask for a minor amendment to the legislation, which could be […]