On New Year’s Day 2020, the Navy ship HMAS Choules left Sydney Harbour for a rescue mission to Mallacoota. Images of families huddled on the beach on this Victorian coastal town, as a firestorm closed in, became emblematic of the sense of existential crisis that gripped much of Australia. Long suffered by people at the margins, the climate crisis arrived in terrifying ways for the Australian mainstream.

In sacred lands, stories experience growth in the memories of untamed love. It is a world revolving around a core made up of unexplainable metaphors. Wrapping themselves within the reasoning of the subjective mode. Togetherness tied in a dreamt notion of freedom written nowhere. In the merge into the intention of listening.

Smoke haze hangs over Melbourne. The rim of my car-door is caked in orange dust after red rains. People post shots of the compromised view from their windows and balconies, visibility updates, rain water tank statuses: water like sweet sticky soft drinks left out on a hot summer’s day. I do not rejoice in these recent months of bushfires. But I am pleased that their traces have arrived in our capitals.

The rainbow serpent comes through here on the dry land, and made the creeks, the rivers and waterholes. That’s why on white mans maps rivers look like snake tracks. The serpent made the water run really really really deep and fit himself in it. That became the waterholes around Alice Springs.

I don’t know. Perhaps critique — let alone ‘radical critique’ — is today finished as a viable modality of action, whether private or public, moral or political. The word critique enters English from the French in the late 16th century, although its fortunes really take off in the eighteenth century, where it is bound to the upsurge of quote-unquote ‘Enlightenment,’ with all of the ambiguities accompanying that complex phenomenon and its crises, critics, criticisms, criticising and criteria.

Marxist-feminist poetics, I have argued elsewhere, requires a preoccupation with social reproduction – as a theme and as an object of inquiry and critique – while at the same time being invested in the temporalities of women’s work. Time itself has been shaped by capitalism in relation to how we work and live.

Sean Bonney (1969-2019) died in November.  He was a British anti-fascist activist, revolutionary socialist and poet who was born in Brighton and raised in the north of England. He lived in London, and, from 2015 until his death, in Berlin. He was married to poet Frances Kruk. His last book of poems, Our Death, was […]

Salons advertise all kinds of treatments, from the mundane – Feeling sad? Get a mood-lifting manicure! – to the outlandish – Dull skin? Try our revitalising facial made from nightingale poo! These treatments are sold as the latest scientific miracles guaranteed to make you feel younger, sexier and more confident. But there is much more to salons than the newest age-defying goo or the freshest hairstyles: these are intensely intimate spaces.

It is now twenty years since the first Matrix film was released. Written and directed by the Wachowski sisters, Lilly and Lana, the film became a social phenomenon, transforming science fiction in the process. Inspired by everything from cyberpunk literature to the philosophies of Jean Baudrillard and René Descartes to the Gnostic gospels, the film was a melange of images and ideas that nevertheless found a mass audience.  

As 2019 comes to an end, it would be wrong not to mark the centenary of one of the most momentous and least remembered events of the twentieth century: the German Revolution. The revolution doesn’t have one sole year as its anniversary. It raged from 1918 to 1923, spreading from the mutinous naval yards of Kiel to the pits and steelworks of the Ruhr.

Written by Queensland barrister Cathy McLennan, Saltwater has received almost universal acclaim among readers, reviewers and indeed the Queensland Literary Awards (QLAs), which declared it ‘Best Non-Fiction Book’ in 2017. Its author, appointed a magistrate shortly before the book’s publication, has since accepted invitations to speak on matters of law and policy affecting Aboriginal people and communities.

Sayaka Murata’s recently translated novel Convenience Store Woman opens with a soundscape. The protagonist, Keiko, is alert to the subtle sounds of the shop in which she works, recognising a fridge door opening and a cold drink being removed as indicators that the customer is about to make their purchase.

Since we met in Isfahan in 2016 and discovered our shared interest in poetry and literary translation, we have co-translated many Persian works, both classical and modern. Most of our translations have been carried out across continents, through email exchanges and text messages, but we have also had the chance to refine our method in person, in Yerevan, Beirut and Birmingham.

When the public hearings for the NSW Special Commission of Inquiry into the Drug ‘Ice’ began in May this year, my brother Mitchell had just been released from prison for the eighth time.

Television has always been a medium that brings people together. Even when watched alone, it is simulcast into millions of locations, bonding far-flung audiences in a shared zeitgeist. The idea of ‘water-cooler TV’ captures the sense in which we’ve understood TV as a medium experienced simultaneously and reflected upon immediately, among people whose social ties are otherwise loose. Digital technology has multiplied and amplified these loose ties.

For years now, I have listened to first-hand accounts of the dangers of being overly connected: strangers, acquaintances and friends who either lament their troubled relationship with the internet and its various contributing technologies – email, social media, smartphones, connectedness in general – or who report great benefits to their complexion and psychological health after spending time offline. I believe all these feelings to be plausible and true, even as I am sceptical about the sometimes tacit, often explicit claim that social activities carried out online are inherently less authentic.