. In writing about these historical debates, I do not intend to engage in any specificity around the contemporary funding of the arts with any utterance other than the most simple and correct: it’s fucked and will continue to be fucked.

At the end of October 2023, Kim Scott travelled to Adelaide to speak at the Stories from the South Book Club, a public event held at Dymocks, Rundle Mall that focused on his most recent novel, Taboo (2017). As a long-time admirer of Scott’s work and a passionate scholar of Australian literature, I sat down with Kim in the Adelaide Botanic Gardens the day before, where we conducted this interview.

Our access to information, reporting and education is central to our ability to understand, empathise and act in the face of one of the world’s worst atrocities. What we do now is built on our exposure to stories, access to information and our capacity to historically contextualise the present. The systematic silencing of Palestinian voices by the Australian media over decades has seriously impaired our ability to learn, know and act.

On the way to Meredith 2022, I felt a little like I imagine Mikhail Bakhtin did in Leningrad 1929. The man obviously wanted to party. But lacking a conducive historic situation, he sublimated his desire into a classic work about carnivals and carnivalesque literature.

The destruction of the global commons secured the universal commodification of labour power and thus the system of capital accumulation that has, in an astonishingly brief period, devastated a country sustained by Indigenous labour over tens of thousands of years. In that sense, the violence of Myall Creek never ended.

Since October 7 my friends and I, all of us writers and creatives, cannot stop talking about Palestine. I do not think we have talked about much else. As writers working in academia and the cultural arts, many of us recently agreed that the act of writing itself seemed to have changed. We agreed that all our writing after October 7 would be transformed, irreversibly altered from what we had produced prior to the carnage we are witnessing in Gaza.

On the opening night of the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Anton Chekov’s The Seagull in November 2023, three members of the cast wore keffiyehs during curtain call in a gesture of solidarity with Palestinian people under siege in Gaza and the West Bank by the occupying forces of the Israeli state. The controversy that followed will likely be known to readers. What may be less known is that on the same evening, across the world in the US, three young Palestinian men were shot in Burlington, Vermont by a man who noticed them speaking to each other in Arabic, two of them in keffiyehs.

The underlying logic of the carceral system is that certain people must be made to suffer to keep the rest of the community safe. It’s a maddening lie which has been repeated so many times that we’ve forgotten there are other ways to address harm.

On hangover days my boyfriend and I watch Sailor Moon. It’s ultimate hangover viewing. It’s also, we decided one morning, groggy from the night before and running on little more than BBQ chips and gummy bears, an anti-capitalist text.

I am an egregiously unlikely reviewer for this commemorative volume on the history of New Theatre: I have rarely seen any theatre. Memory is so difficult: as a child of Communist parents, I sort of recall attending with my mother a New Theatre play in Forbes Street, Darlinghurst, in Sydney, down from Kings Cross; also visiting backstage at I think a Waterside Workers Federation hall at the end of a play, my mother wished to say hello to Evelyn Docker, a prominent leftwing actor, and she introduced me to her, I picture a little boy staring at her, mesmerised.

On 6 August 2023 my colleague, mentor and friend Elizabeth Webby AM, Emeritus Professor of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney, died after a long illness. Elizabeth was a no-nonsense person, neither squeamish nor prone to euphemism. In that spirit I opt for the direct, plain-spoken language of “dying” and “death” rather than softer terms like “passed” or “departed”.

The Aguila Azteca creaks out of Nuevo Laredo at twenty-seven minutes after nine. There is that desert in the night and there is this moon shedding silver from what always looks like a horrified face to me no matter what they say about beautiful or green cheese or rabbit (if you are Japanese) and there […]

In May 2023 6 poets, Jas H Duke, Peter Murphy, thalia, Sandy Caldow, Arjun von Caemmerer, and myself, held an exhibition of concrete poetry “Wayword Forword” at the Nicholas Building in Melbourne, curated by Victoria Perin. It attracted a large number of people over its 3 weeks on the wall, and generated a lot of […]

The stumps under our floor are teetering and though not the cause it is nevertheless a cause for alarm, the weight of thousands of books we have partially shelved but also stacked in piles of varying consonance impossible to discard. Yet despite this number, it is the handful of books, missing through loans or misfortune, that haunt me.

Catherine’s geography teacher was right: the creation of any map is an act of implicit colonisation that gives rise to the treacherous belief that the geography of desire can be made to bend to the contours of the rational order.

Carbon sequestration proposes to reverse the ongoing particulate re-distribution of the air; that is, to turn the world upside down. The increasingly suffocating proportion of carbon in the atmosphere must be withdrawn and re-buried, whether through mineralisation as stones, which do not leak, or in unstably lachrymose carbonaceous deposits like trees and soil. Such a material inversion — the interment of air in the ground — rewinds historical time, which was knotted tightly in the deep past’s geological substrates. What burning unravelled, carbon sequestration proposes to restore in a ceremony of apology and appeasement that returns historical time to its safely deposited sediments.