Helen Garner talks to David McAllister, Artistic Director of the Australian Ballet   David McAllister has one of those faces that could only come from Planet Ballet. Is it the cheekbones? The wild-creature tilt they give to his eyes? Now forty-one, he stopped performing five years ago, and I have never seen him dance; but I’ve seen photos of him in flight—and I’ve seen him walk. The morning after I’d watched Jiri, the Australian Ballet’s glorious performance of four pieces by the Czech choreographer Jiri Kylian, I went to the company’s headquarters intending to ask him about the part the […]

During the 1960s, Australia experienced immense social and cultural change as a schism developed between generations: an older generation ravaged by the Great Depression, the Second World War and the Cold War; and a younger one that came of age in a prosperous but seemingly culturally stagnant environment. Clem Christesen, who remained at the helm of Meanjin from the time he founded it in 1940 until 1974, was caught up in this generational divide but he used the magazine to represent and monitor its effects. He was a long-time propo­nent of the need to question existing institutions and values—and this […]

‘Last winter I had an unexpected visitor…’
Helen Garner reflects on life, art and her novel Monkey Grip

Cultural cheerleading (as distinct from cultural preservation) has always been somewhat embarrassing. Indeed, it is the mark of insecurity and provinciality. The condemnatory challenge not to pander to other cultures was, like most things Australian, based on the tribalisms of sport. You had to support the home team. The contradiction was that while philistinism produced natural loyalties and deep roots, the antinomian nature of art severed them. The phrase ‘cultural cringe’ turned on a number of different psychological axes: the desire to find oneself wanting in equal proportion to finding oneself; an arrested adolescence obsessed with measurement (though now Australians […]

James Jupp on populism, One Nation and democratic intersections of public and political

William Gass states: ‘Finnegans Wake is a carcass on which doctoral candidates feed.’ Helene Cixous writes: ‘The thing that is both known and unknown, the most unknown and the best unknown, this is what we are looking for when we write. We go toward the best known unknown thing, where knowing and not knowing touch, where we hope we will know what is unknown. Where we hope we will not be afraid of understanding the incomprehensible, facing the invisible, hearing the inaudible, thinking the unthinkable, which is of course: thinking. Thinking is trying to think the unthinkable: thinking the thinkable […]

I once read somewhere—and the reader should know from these words that this is the beginning of a most unscholarly piece of writing—that men and women were born, grew up, aged and died while Queen Victoria still ruled and was in good health. I was born in the year before Meanjin was born, and I did not become aware of its existence until we were both in our late teens, but I have grown up and aged while Meanjin has flourished, and I cannot even conceive of the possibility that the older of us two might outlive the younger. Since […]

You get somebody coming in, a foreigner at that, trying to tell us to rename our mountains. —Bob Stone, Stawell town councillor In March 1989 the Victorian Minister for Tourism, Steve Crabb, announced that the Grampians mountain range in western Victoria would ‘revert to their Aboriginal name, Guriward’ (which after further research was altered to Gariwerd). Although this initiative came from the Victorian Tourism Commission, and the local Koori community had not yet been con­sulted, the minister felt that he could already announce the names that would be ‘restored’: I expect that the Grampians will be known as Guriward, the […]

The statement in the title may be misleading. No typescript stays for long on my desk. As soon as I’ve written a page or so of comments I send typescript, comments and my recommendation back to the editor. Yet my desk is the end of one road for many a promising piece of fiction. The author, perhaps the friends or advisers of the author, perhaps a literary agent—these people have considered the typescript worth sending to Meanjin. The editor and the assistant editor of Meanjin have read the typescript and have liked it. Then the typescript has been passed on […]

Emotionality or feeling is threaded through a person’s day. It does not just appear at appointed times in pre-selected places; nor is it far oft. It is with the person all the time, contextualised and interwoven through their thoughts and actions. —N.K. Denzin   We give much attention to the efficiency of our cities, although they are sometimes far from efficient. We give some attention to the equity of our cities, although we could do much more to make them fairer. A creative city must be efficient; it should be a city that is concerned with the material well-being of all its citizens, […]

I write sentences. I write first one sentence, then another sentence. I write sentence after sentence. I write a hundred or more sentences each week and a few thousand sentences a year. After I’ve written each sentence I read it aloud. I listen to the sound of the sentence, and I don’t begin to write the next sentence unless I’m absolutely satisfied with the sound of the sentence I’m listening to. When I’ve written a paragraph I read it aloud to learn whether all the sentences that sounded well on their own still sound well together. When I’ve written two […]