Occasionally one encounters a story or situation that seems to reach out of the mass of historical fact and lend an individual shape to its anonymous suffering. In October 1917 one such remarkable incident took place on the battlefield of Passchendaele in western Belgium; it began a search for the relatives of the dead which has continued for more than a century.

On the face of things, Hope’s “Australia” (1943) is a mocking self-effacement of the colonial experience; but the poem is also “devastatingly ignorant of anything other than a whitefella, civilising view of settler culture” (Harrison 2004:287). One wonders on the affects that become available when Hope’s accusatory evisceration of Australian dumbness is misread, purposefully, so that his gaze no longer judges colonisers but instead is read as surveying colonised others.

When a novel invites me, as does the title section opening of Scott McCulloch’s debut novel Basin — “Figure in Terminal Landscape” — to approach it as I might a piece of visual art or dance or theatre, or even as a piece of music, my whole heart gladdens. Yes, and yes! Because this is what happens for me anyway when I read a novel, as I have always thought, since it will always be the thingness of the work and how that thingness affects (or not) my being in the world that tells me whether I am likely to keep that novel by me always or not.

Geoffrey Blainey’s recent article in The Weekend Australian (1–2 July) urged Australians to get the “facts in order” before voting on The Voice portrays the “Yes” campaign as historically unfounded and a misrepresention of Australian history before and after 1788.

To be Indigenous is to share cascading crises with the earth. Swarms of plastic suffocate our beaches; our wetlands drained for dairy farming are prone to catastrophic floods; the soils we live on are poisoned by industrial toxins, causing soaring rates of asthma and cancer in our communities.

I’m the first to admit I’ve tried to unmake journalism, or at least smooth its edges. Rather than break stories, I’ve been broken by them. I’ve never won a Walkley, or even been nominated for one. But then, I decided to spend nearly three decades of my life in a highly competitive industry driven by ego and the cult of personality, fortified by whiteness and normativity.

The new cartographers—Indigenous, grassroots, academic, etc.—are building new cartographic worldviews, methods and projects to talk back to the colonial cartographies that helped to structure the worldviews, laws and governance systems of settler-colonial societies like Australia.

The logic of delegated politics encourages this upward gaze from even its most principled adherents. They understand themselves as working on behalf of others and it’s easy to consider their own elevation a victory for an oppressed constituency, with the actual exclusion of that constituency obscured by the ambiguities of ‘representation’. Delegated politics often evolves into what I call ‘smug politics’: a model of social change in which the masses are neither a source of agency nor a constituency to be serviced but a problem to be policed.

My first real encounter with John Tranter’s work, outside the miscellaneous poetry journals that somehow found their way into the local public library, came about unexpectedly enough through the efforts of John Millett, editor of the soon-to-be-defunct Poetry Australia.

At least part of the rhetorical power of this work is owed to its drawing directly on the settler archive that presents early historical accounts of land as ‘verdant, open, pleasant and gentle’, as ‘gentleman’s parks’, thereby, demonstrating what pre-invasion land looked like under Indigenous custodianship, management, and care.

We sit in East Point Reserve and look at how the gidjaas, green ants, make globe-like homes out of the leaves — connected edges with fibrous tissue that I later learn is faithful silk. Safe inside. Why isn’t it safe outside? I pick up the plastic around this circular lake cause this is the way […]

In 1492, Spain believed itself to have discovered the New World, as they referred to Abya Yala. Even in European terms this was not a discovery, the Norse explorer Leif Erikson having travelled through North America in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Archaeologists, historians and academics still dispute when Abya Yala was first inhabited.

My mother and father missed it all. Bunnykins to bomber jackets, dummies to cigarettes. I was raised somewhere else. Given another mum. A different dad. Handed around until I stuck like a stickle brick to my brand-new brother, who was also riding the magic carousel of secret adoption circa 1970. Our shared reality was a […]

In January 2021, one day after thousands of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol, I underwent a craniotomy far from home in Loveland, Colorado to remove a low-grade tumour from the front left of my brain. In 2016 the World Health Organization stopped calling such tumours ‘benign’ as, when it comes to the brain, anything where it should not be cannot be classed as benign.

Blurbed as ‘The stunning, explosive new novel from the bestselling author of The Museum of Modern Love, winner of the 2017 Stella Prize’, Bruny is, according to the Allen & Unwin PR department, a ‘searing, subversive novel about family, love, loyalty and the new world order’, ‘a cry from the heart and a fiercely entertaining and crucial work of imagination’, one that dares to ask ‘burning’ questions like ‘How far would they go? How far would you?’ and ‘What would you do to protect the place you love?'