Esther Anatolitis (ediitor), Meanjin Vol 83 Nº 2 (Winter 2024)
(links are to the Meanjin website: some but not all of them are available to non-subscribers)
This Meanjin is incredibly rich and varied. I’ve carried it in my backpack for weeks, mostly reading a single article or story at a time when on public transport, in waiting rooms or queues, or occasionally – as in the days before podcasts – while walking. I have learned about:
- the importance of the continuing presence of traditional owners, with the Dja Dja Wurrung Clans as an example
- collaborative reasoning in education
- toadstools, particularly the fly agaric
- the parlous state of freelance journalism
- the backlash against Indigenous language reclamation
- the challenges facing constitutional change in Australia
- how ChatGPT and the like are part of the neoiberal project
- the cultural meanings of images of Uluru
- the mystique of Heide and Australian modernism
- death doulas
- the discipline of Repair Studies.
Click on any link in that list, and you may find something instructive, challenging, entertaining or all three.
As the child of a farmer in North Queensland, where Mamu land has never been ceded and sugarcane monoculture has not been kind to the land, I was particularly moved by Katherine Wilson’s brief memoir about regenerative farming and collaboration with traditional owners, ‘Our Bog Paddock’s Understory‘.
I also want to mention ‘We, small heroes‘ by Micaela Sahhar, a short reflection on what it means in the current era that Palestinian culture has hospitality as a core value.
Of the four excellent pieces of fiction, Katerina Gibson’s ‘Something Dormant‘ stands out as a complex story of young, unrequited love remembered, with an environmental twist.
One of the joys of this Meanjin is the way its nine poems are spread throughout, so each one comes as a pleasant surprise among the prose. Having just this morning read an editorial on ‘eco-poetry’ in the Guardian (poetry ‘cannot ignore global heating’), I’ll single out Caitlin Maling’s ‘Ordinary Disaster‘, a chillingly affectless account of a mass dying of fish among coral in Western Australia.
It’s my blogging custom to focus on page 77. In November, I try to include a verse stanza in each blog post. Page 77 in this issue is part of a fascinating interview with architecture critic Naomi Stead (link here). The phrase that gives me my opening line comes from this paragraph:
I don’t want to be the schoolmarm, but if people understand more about the built environment – how it’s procured, how it comes into being, how it’s not an accident, how there’s almost nothing in our cities that is not deliberately designed – then they can begin to see the role that they themselves could play. I mean we should expect more, we should demand more of our cities and buildings and built environment, but we can only do that with a degree of knowledge and education about how this came to be, and what could be.
Rather than enlarge on Professor Stead’s point, my little verse follows where the phrase takes it. That and the plane that flew over our flat as I typed the first full stop.
November verse 6: We should demand more of our cities
We should demand more of our cities.
Not more aircraft overhead.
No more oh-dears, what-a-pities –
Packer's Pecker, Jeff's Shed.
Perhaps less civil inattention,
less of what's too gross to mention,
neighbours partying till four,
Mormons knocking on the door.
Demand more? Let me try. O Sydney,
Demand more? Let me try. O Sydney,
give me silence, show me stars,
let me breathe air free from tars.
So many things I'd have you give me.
Make your waters clear again,
and some day soon please change your name
I wrote this blog post on Gade / Wane, not far from Warrane, which some people want to give its name to the whole of Sydney. I acknowledge the Gadigal and Wangal Elders past present and emerging, and gratrefully acknowldge their care for this land for millennia.
Me fail? I fly! 