It is now a hundred years since TS Eliot’s poem ‘The Wasteland’, appeared in The Dial. Numerous global  commemorations have taken place, both academic and popular, many of which have been uncritically hagiographic or, otherwise, laudatory.

To flip through the thick, matte pages of Theory of Colours is to wander around an abandoned theme park at dusk. Dimly, you can make out certain structures in the falling light: a hotel, a museum, a swimming pool, and various attractions harnessing the vertiginous interplay of height and depth, including mountains, valleys, towers and gaping chasms.

We were in a car, and the movement may have been particularly fast, or it might not have been, but those motifs remain, as in most memories, separate from finer feelings or the consequence of detail. As is only natural for that kind of brilliant day, we thought of that thing called ‘the beach’ and we were moving with the inevitability of numbers getting crunched.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow is a book that has remained an enigma since it was first published in a heavily censored form in 1947. Not only was it censored, but its publication was delayed due to wartime paper shortages, and one of the early uncensored manuscripts was lost between Adelaide and Melbourne.

The desire to construct climate as ordered and predictable can be understood as existing within the geological philosophy of gradualism. Because climate is ordered, predictable and expected, it assumes a disguise of naturalness, which allows it to disappear as a site of interrogation, in much the same way that notions of gender, sexuality and race have done historically.

If you were in the Western Hemisphere, and you walked into a room full of strangers talking about Katrina, Harvey, Mitchell or Maria, you might know who they were talking about. If you were from Taiwan, you might introduce Fanapi; if you were several centuries old, you could talk about San Francisco.

Mullock heaps pockmark the bush and my home rests uneasily on wounded land. Land that holds memory, holds remnants: derivative of remains—all that is left, but also that which continues to exist. Djaara, the local Dja Dja Wurrung people, call it ‘Upside Down Country’, because what should have been left below, now sits on top.

At the old Heathcote Mental Reception Home, Martu artist Curtis Taylor installs his art. He has erected a bow shelter in the middle of the main room and spread sand and pieces of broken crab on the polished floorboards. Behind a locked door in a white room, he has piled bark on a metal hospital bed. In the flickering light, it looks like piled clothing or shed skin. This place is also known as Goolugatup, and Kooyagoordup.

Last year marked the fiftieth anniversary of Wake in Fright, one of Australian cinema’s most unsettling horror movies, as well as one of its most perceptive works of national self-interrogation. Adapted from Kenneth Cook’s 1961 novel of the same name and directed by Ted Kotcheff of later First Blood fame, Wake in Fright has attained a semi-mythical status firstly as a ‘lost movie’

In 1838, the Sydney Herald dismissed arguments about prior Indigenous possession of the place now known as Australia. In its response to Aboriginal claims, the editorial argued that ‘[t]his vast country was to [Indigenous people] a common—they bestowed no labor upon the land—their ownership, their right, was nothing more than that of the Emu or the Kangaroo.’ The editorial expressed the philosophical underpinning of terra nullius: that, as John Locke says, land becomes property only when man ‘improve[s] it for the benefit of Life, and therein lay[s] out something upon it that was his own, his labour’.

There is a Bugarrigarra story from north-west Australia about spirit children, the rayi, who emerge from the water to create future children in the minds of dreamers. Among other things, the story suggests that rights and obligations can be inherited as well as bestowed. The story is significant to Paddy Roe, a Nyigina man from Broome in Western Australia, whose authority and custodianship is linked to a vision of a pregnant stingray he experienced with his wife, Mary Pikalli. In part, the vision conveyed the future coming of children in his family.

Amid the repercussions of decades of ecological disaster invented or intensified by capitalist development and a historical rift between red and green movements in the West, Marxist ecology, emerging in the late nineties and early 2000s, recuperates Marx’s writing into ecological materialism, which can inform otherwise typically apolitical or liberal solutions to our concurrent climate catastrophes. It is from this standpoint that a Marxist intervention into ecopoetics can be articulated.

The paradigm ‘capital’ (of capitalism) has a revealing etymology. Originating from the Latin ‘capitalis’, meaning, ‘of the head’, in contemporary usage, capital typically refers to that which is of greatest importance (such as the capital city); that which comes first and stands out (such as the capital letter); or that which sits above or on top (as the head literally sits above the shoulders, or as a figurative head sits atop a hierarchical structure, such as the head of a family, state or corporation).

Lucy Van’s book of poetry The Open, published by Cordite and recently long-listed for the Stella Prize, is made up of mostly prose poems. The sentences that make up Van’s prose are very fun and full of life. Merlinda Bobis in her Introduction puts it well: ‘We’ve just touched what’s here, or are about to touch it, when apprehension is quickly unsettled, halted or reconfigured.’ This is true from sentence to sentence, the way they are stacked.

This essay focuses on the novel La vorágine (1924) by José Eustasio Rivera as a document from a chapter in Latin American history. It looks for connections between the effects that modernity was having over Amazonia one century ago, with those that are currently affecting the largest rainforest on the planet. In my work as a fiction writer, I have often explored the relation between the so-called civilised world and the tropical jungle. Approximately one decade ago, I wrote a stage play (which I later turned into a graphic novel) that occurs in a future where the possession, consumption and traffic of meat products have been declared illegal.

It seems to me that the utopian potential of Universal Income can easily be exaggerated, but so can its dangers and implausibility. There are struggles all around us which, on a daily basis, we’re forced to abandon and forget. Given increased power over our own attention wouldn’t make these problems disappear, even more would emerge. Material poverty, for all the most airtight policies and implementations, will likely never cease to exist.