Read a selection of pieces

This week’s reading trail travels with award-winning Indigenous author, academic and activist Tony Birch as he describes writing his 2015 novel Ghost River, awarded the 2016 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing, shortlisted for categories in that year’s NSW ...

Cultural mediation connects audiences to artwork through conversation that meets visitors where they are. It works to communicate an artist’s intent in a way that builds on the viewer’s own understandings and experiences, without mediators dominating any of these exchange ...

Head to the Pilliga Scrub this week with two extraordinary observers of Australia, its landscapes, histories and potential futures. Originally published in 2016, “Changescapes” travels with Ross Gibson as Gibson travels with Eric Rolls in the quest to “graft” Rolls’ ...

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 ...

This week’s Reading Trail in support of ABC-RN’s imminent Top 100 Australian Books poll revisits Helen Garner’s appreciation of the work of Elizabeth Jolley . In this overview, published in the winter of 1983, Garner celebrates Jolley’s humour, her pathos, ...

This week’s ABC Radio National Top-100-adjacent trail heads down the Booker pathway. As you contemplate the 2026 Booker-Prize longlist (and imagine the judging conversations that must be happening amongst that fantasy-dinner-party panel of Mary Beard, Jarvis Cocker, Patricia Lockwood, Rebecca ...

In October 1973, Australian novelist Patrick White was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. This week’s reading trail heads back to 1957, when White published an extract from Voss, his fifth novel, in Meanjin, volume 16, no. 3. This book, ...

Since 2016, Meanjin has published an occasional series called “Australia in Three Books”, which invites contributors to nominate three titles that speak to an idea of Australia for them – what it was, what it is, what it could be, ...

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 ...

Reviewed: Here are My Demands, Andrew Roff, Wakefield Press At the centre of Andrew Roff’s science fiction novel Here Are My Demands is policy advisor Maggie Gurewal’s attempt at implementing a universal basic income in 2058 Australia, immediately following the ...

Reviewed: Plastic Budgie, Olivia De Zilva, Pink Shorts Press The debut offering from Olivia De Zilva is a bildungsroman that sits somewhere between autobiography and fiction—a fragmented, although chronological, account of a young girl’s (also named Olivia) becoming. Plastic Budgie ...

Reviewed: The Wallace Line: A Poem, Jennifer Mackenzie, Transit Lounge The Wallace Line is a faunal boundary line in the Indo-Australian Archipelago. Drawn in the mid-nineteenth century by the English naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, it cuts through the Indian Ocean ...

Reviewed: Cannon, Lee Lai, Giramondo Like her award-winning 2021 debut Stone Fruit, Lai’s latest graphic novel Cannon wastes no time easing readers in. Lai drops us right into the mess—literally. The opening scene is pure chaos, tables overturned, plates shattered, ...

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 ...