Essays

Mounted into sockets in my skull are two prime lenses. They are 35mm, a focal length that mimics the field of view of the human eye, according to photographers. What my prime lenses see is recorded on a memory card ...

I first came across Elizabeth Jolley’s writing in Meanjin in 1979. A story called The Bench (now retitled Adam’s Bride in her Penguin collection Woman in a Lampshade) opens with these sentences: All small towns in the country have some ...

Sofie Laguna for Australian in Three Books ...

My favourite book is Anna Karenina. In the dying days of Tsarist Russia, trains carried the force of modernity—the unstoppable symbol of a new age pressing against the old world. Trains were the technology that brought the future whether people ...

Karen Fletcher is furious. She stands on an uneven picnic table and her legs shake as she addresses the few hundred people who have gathered with her to protest the demolition of the public housing tower that reaches toward the ...

Activism is not for everyone. When I say the word ‘activist’, I evoke an image of a certain person: a picket-wielder, with a voice loud, definite with conviction, someone who summons provocative slogans from thin air, a Greta Thunberg type ...

These three books spell out an anxiety that, in 2025, is there on our newsfeeds on a daily basis ...

The first sign that something truly extraordinary had happened should have been the sight of Laurie Oakes running ...

Whitlam’s legacy seems more imperilled now than at any time since 1975 ...

We deserve to be a republic, free to live in peace from coups, state surveillance and nuclear war ...

The story of women in Australian politics since 1975 is a vexed one, marked by some success and a degree of shame ...

Whitlam meant a great deal to working-class migrant communities ...

Perhaps the existential risk Creative Australia faces is its own pusillanimous lack of faith ...

What is a revolution, exactly? Where and how does it begin, and, perhaps more importantly, how does it end? ...