Magic was important to me for a while. I was strangely tethered to an idol. But it wasn’t a sophisticated connection, nor constant. In contemplating my imagined virus, I was variously confused, frightened, forgetful, fine.
Walking to Gernika with Picasso’s Guernica
If you think walking alone on steep tracks through Spanish forest overgrown with eucalypt, blackberry and bracken in oppressively humid weather carrying a 12-kilogram backpack for 25 kilometres every day for about six weeks is your idea of a good break from urban life, then the Camino del Norte from Irun along the northern coast of Spain to Santiago de Compostela in Galacia is for you. And if you like barking dogs, walking on narrow country roads and through industrial wastelands then by all means take the plunge. I did. This was to be my second pilgrimage. Having completed the Camino […]
Occasionally, a Stranger to Watch the Stars With
Occasionally, a Stranger to Watch the Stars With by Andrea Baldwin.
Vanishing Point
I cannot distinguish between the grief and the pain or between what is real and what is not and it has nothing to do with refusing to believe but with an inability to comprehend.
Leaving. For Good
This isn’t the only time I’ve planned to leave Australia, though it has certainly been the most contested. My mother says fate has something to do with it. I was young the first time; I was only 19. The dream was to work in motorsport, a fantasy sparked after watching the B-grade film Catch that Kid. The movie featured a much younger but already sullen-faced Kristen Stewart, and that guy from High School Musical who wasn’t Zac Efron (Corbin Bleu?). The film was picked out by my younger brother, Yasseen, in our local Blockbuster knock-off. It was part of a […]
Parsley Tea
It was all I could taste, despite not having touched the stuff for hours. It has a way of lingering, parsley, and I could feel it in the roof of my mouth, at the back of my throat, and in the strange unsettling warmth in my gut. This, despite the smells: the splashed urine by the grey metal toilet bowl, the beer from the Germans in the next compartment and the musk of old woollen blankets on that ancient Soviet train. It was dark, sometime in the early morning, although I’d had so much cold and flu medication—and Bulgarian cold and […]
National Accounts: Question Time
For a few seconds, I’m rendered speechless. I look at the academic hosting our session. She half-smiles nervously, but doesn’t intervene. ‘No,’ I finally answer. ‘No. I will not be releasing an album.’
The Best of Meanjin 2017: Memoir
Meanjin has published some fine short memoir pieces in 2017. Memoir can be an act of reportage, resistance or confession. The late and much loved John Clarke writes tenderly of the commonplace…
The Fox
Their throats are torn and bellies ripped open.
Tubes and organs, red and purple. Fat green blowflies crawl and swarm in their low army hum …
All That’s Forbidden
‘Your soul is more important than your body,’ Sister Beatrice said during religious instruction. ‘Your soul is your connection to God. Like a tidy house you must keep it clean.’
Blood Brother
It’s always summer in childhood. I remember when we went to see the Peanuts movie Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown for your birthday. Your dad dropped us off outside the cinema and we accidentally went into the wrong cinema and saw The Deep instead. It was 1977. We were nine years old. Lost treasure, Jacqueline Bisset in a wet T-shirt, harpoon guns. We lived next door to each other until we were 15, our back yards joined by a gate cut into the fence, through which we could come and go as we pleased. We climbed to the tops […]
Commonplace
What have Spike Milligan, Weary Dunlop and the Ulster Rising got in common?
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