Trauma is a strange bedfellow. In its company you binge on adrenaline and will anyone to have a go. Don’t push in front of me. Don’t mess with me. Go on, mess with me.

Content warning: sexual assault A response to Shannon Burns on childhood sexual assault In the late 1980s, around the age of 11, I hit puberty with the force of an 80-tonne road train. I became the third-tallest child in my primary school and grew exquisitely painful adult-sized breasts whose entire surface was livid purple scar tissue. When I started high school, at 11 going on 12, I looked old enough to be allowed to buy cigarettes at the milk bar down the street for the year-ten boys who were old enough (the smoking age was then 16) but didn’t look […]

Dang, sorry. This is only available to a Meanjin subscriber. But we can fix that. It’s just $80 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 $80 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 $80 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 $80 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 $80 for print or $50 for digital. DIGITAL PRINT

No rays of light sneaking long fingers across the pale skin of morning. Not at this time. Beyond the window glass the stars shone precision silver, dew casting a silvery skeen across thirsty grass. I’d lie awake in the darkness waiting to hear the cough of the Toyota bring the catch home and him with it. I’d learnt to wait for the fluorescent light to cast diamante warmth through the white double doors windowed by an earlier deco-age of artistic privacy. When opened, conversations drifted like song, bounced by high ceilings and slick laminate floors. But closed, sound muffled and […]

About three months after Black Saturday dad and I drove up to the place where our house used to be …

If I were to tell you our story in sign language—the story of my grandparents and me—I’d begin with a single finger touching my chest. My hands would form the signs for ‘grew up’ and then ‘next door’: a flattened palm rising from my torso to eye level; followed by my index finger hooked over my thumb and turned over at the wrist like a key in an ignition. I’d use the signs for ‘my grandparents’: a clenched fist over my heart, and the letter signs ‘G, M, F’ to represent ‘grand-mother-father’. Then, placing two fingers over my right ear, […]

This book will change your life is a phrase to make the eyes roll, especially if you’re a book publisher. It is conceivable that a book’s wisdom and insight might make you fitter or smarter, a better lover, cook or parent. It might make you more empathetic and spiritual, calmer and neater to boot. It might transform your social interactions as your friends start twitching as you drone on about a book’s revelations. Residents of the Land of Literature will argue that the pleasure of serious reading—a noble end in itself—is life-changing enough. I am an optimist and a booster […]

The shoulder bumps from strangers that make me shove back during the day go down easier at night. The power dynamic shifts when you hurry against the CBD’s foot traffic as a group, newly animated with the ability to break up other clusters of bodies with your increased speed and size. On the corner of Sydney’s George and Bathurst I glance up, diverted by some Big Four firm’s logo beaming down—its sedate, civilised, civilising weight. The building’s few lit office windows cut and blaze against the ones that have gone dark. I imagine being one of those floating Friday bodies shifting […]