Are we morally whole when we allow a hell hole like the detention centres of Nauru and Manus?It’s a question conjured in the lead story of MEANJIN QUARTERLY AUTUMN 2018.
Doctor Nick Martin was a GP on Nauru working for International Health and Medical Services (IHMS) and his diary is compulsory reading for all who want a civil and informed conversation about Australia’s refugee policy.
The current MEANJIN lives up to its rich reputation of rigorous writing across essay, memoir, fiction and poetry, a veritable smorgasbord of dissemination and elucidation of the contemporary Zeitgeist.
Upfront, Melanie Cheng’s piece on empathy is an emphatic essay on the empirical evidence that the “E” word is vital to a healthy and functioning democracy. “But we need to be aware of how our empathy can be manipulated….Our greatest defence is to read widely, listen to both sides of politics and make up our own minds.”
Film buffs will find a ton of fun in Luke Slattery’s The Elephant in the Film, an expose of Merrian C. Cooper’s, Chang, the film he made five years before his most famous flick, King Kong. This half-forgotten masterpiece of silent cinema was nominated at the first Academy Awards in 1929 in the category Best Unique and Artistic Picture. As Slattery so rightfully states, that’s a category well worth reviving. As is the interest in Chang, “a work of rare cinematic prophecy.”
Music lovers will thrill to the enthralling piece The Song Remains the Same by Andrew Ford and Anni Heino. You’re in for something good as they lead you through the fascinating trajectory of the song, I’m Into Something Good, the Goffin-King ditty that delivered Herman’s Hermits, first and last, one and only number one hit in Britain. You’re in for something good when you discover the conception, birth and nurturing of this song before it became the HH hit.
Another famous song springboards Andrew Sant’s sad story, On Regret, a tale that will, undoubtedly, dog you into chasing the bawl.
Kerrie Davies looks at Bertha Lawson, Henry Lawson’s wife, and the nature and attitude of Australian domestic violence. Shannon Burns recalls an early sexual awakening marked by an age divide in a wise memoir, A Different Time.
Antony Loewenstein sketches his Jewish atheist journey and novelist Jennifer Mills shares a moment of creative immersion with her mother, Margaret, a landscape painter.
Thematically, threads of pressing social and political issues weave in contentious, controversial conversations on colonisation, its consequences and reverberations, gay rights, and the divide between West Sydney and the rest of the country.
Being non Anglo gay in the Western suburbs is focal for two of the writers – Omar Sakr and Peter Polites. Sakr’s piece, National Accounts, abounds in unabated anger and antagonism, confounding as much as confronting, while Polites, The Final Boys, is more anger managed. Both, however, crusade the truth that any percentage of a heart is still a heart.
MEANJIN Volume 77, Issue 1, Autumn 2018.
After a three-year break, the Meanjin podcast is back. Authors, readings, conversations, poets: it’s an irresistible mix of fine words and ideas, a spoken version of Australia’s favourite literary quarterly. One can subscribe through iTunes.