Memoir

Meanjin acknowledges the passing of Hilary McPhee, who began her brilliant career in writing and publishing as this journal’s editorial assistant and guest-edited the Winter 2015 edition of Meanjin, an undertaking she described as ‘a surprising pleasure.’ Her own writing ...

When I was little I was always very interested in big women who shamelessly mentioned their knickers in front of my father. These women sometimes sang fragments of music, often quite difficult passages in which there might be two violins, ...

My sixth year of life is timestamped by a stupid thing I did at a kindergarten friend’s house ...

My sister’s first book has been released, an expression that makes a book sound like wildlife ...

Everything is lost, we say, when all hope is gone ...

In learning to listen, we choose noise instead of silence. Against the repression of vox nullius, we seek the raucous cacophony of vox populous ...

I no longer flinch when someone asks if my family were boat people: it is a part of who I am. Their story is also my story ...

It’s difficult to choose which type of pain is better. Each is very different ...

1. Liars Everything I tell you from this point on will be a lie. 2. Moon as companion Our new house has three bedrooms, and I do not give the third to my daughter, who desperately wants it. Instead, it ...

It was late one night in the early nineties. I was 19 and hanging out with an artist friend in Melbourne’s bayside suburb of St Kilda. It was still a rock’n’roll part of town then: Joey’s for the speed heads, ...

To spot a beautiful man. Oh the skill. Beautiful like eyes and lips but not like bed and breakfast and a good conversation. Not complex, bitter like that. There’s a place for this type of beauty I’m sure. You write ...

If you are reading this, you are ready to speak truth to power. The question is where is the power? ...

Late winter’s afternoon, deciduous trees in the throes of regaining their colour, a tiny hand warm and damp pulling me beneath the jungle gym ...

I will start with a sort of allegory. A bastardised version of Gerald Murnane’s short fiction ‘Landscape with Freckled Woman’ from Landscape with Landscape, simplified and clarified and maybe slightly warped ...

Far North Queensland—Lake Placid—the dark banks—my brother jumping off an escarpment into the thick water without knowing how to swim—a crocodile ...