It’s like the apocalypse out there.’ How many times I heard it said in the summer, in the bushfire season. The exclamatory tone of the early months made way for weariness in January, and desperate humour by early autumn as floods, brown rain, the COVID-19 virus and the great toilet paper crisis of the first weeks of March replaced drought and fire. Fires are already burning outside Brisbane in early September when I get there for the writers festival. The air is hazy and the temperature is in the low thirties, and I feel a lurch of dislocation. It’s not […]

If you are in or close to the bush, leave now. If you choose to stay, we may not be able to save you. Save woollen blankets to wrap yourself in if the fire comes. If you are trapped in your car, face the oncoming fire, close windows and doors tightly, and get down below window level. Towards the end of last year, a friend and I sent each other emails full of the thoughts you try not to give voice to. If we were going to be preppers, where would we choose to live? If we bought a block […]

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

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

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

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 the twenty-first century, confronting what was then the worst drought on record, the Australian Government embarked on its most expensive, most ambitious nation-building project: the Murray–Darling Basin Plan. A $13 billion realignment to rescue the nation’s food bowl and to restore its rivers. In 2007 John Howard promised a ‘complete overhaul’ of the interior ‘to confront head-on the over­allocation of water’. And because this was that kind of pastoral undertaking that relied on the mettle of farmers, and not a little because Canberra was handing out fistfuls of cash, a story of reform took hold. Primary producers were to […]

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The internet may have been a creature of the US military-industrial complex and, later, a global network of computer engineers working on it for LOLs, but there is also something quintessentially Australian in the way it has taken ownership of us. The pantheon of tech titans that now rule the world subscribe to the same creed of rugged exceptionalism our forebears brought to these shores. They colonised our lives as the Europeans invaded this ancient continent: a new and foreign power brazenly staking its claim on our reality as if it had never been occupied, as though what was ours […]

Was the interest in my work explicitly linked to my identity? Were they looking for the next successful blak book?

Somewhere before White Fragility became the lingo du jour of anti-racism workshops, white people stopped telling me out loud that they were ‘one of the good ones’. They chuckled and said ‘Oh, I’m so white’. They offered me a conspiring wink. It’s not as suave when I reciprocate. I can only blink, or hold my hand over one eye like an optometrist, testing just what it is I’m meant to be seeing.

Before it was a Bomb, the Bomb was an idea. Superman, however, was a Faster, Stronger, Better idea. —Grant Morrison, Supergods It seems the superhero is an idea whose time has come. Popular culture is saturated with men and women with extraordinary powers and glib one-liners, thanks primarily to Marvel’s cinematic domination of the box office. The 22nd film made by Marvel Studios—Avengers: Endgame (Anthony and Joe Russo, 2019)—bested James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) as the biggest movie of all time, reaping almost US$2.8 billion. Collecting comic books might remain a niche activity, but the superheroes born in their pages are […]