ESSAYS
BROWNFACE editorial
I was 12 and in Year 7 when Chris Lilley’s mockumentary Summer Heights High aired on ABC for the first time.
A Mouth Saying Stroh-beh-ree
For reasons sufficient to the writer, as ‘Papa’ would say, certain places, people and words have been left out of these notes. Some are secret and some are known by everyone.
In Black and White: Pictures from the Camera Obscura
I’ve been trying to train myself out of black. It’s not going well – on the rack my eye still heads that way every time. I know in theory that some colour would suit me better but I seem to be shut in the dark.
SINGAPORE Editorial
We consciously eschewed the substantial but well-represented body of Singaporean poetry originally written in English, and instead sought out voices from Tamil, Malay, Chinese and more which have not been as well circulated in the anglophone literary world.
PROPAGANDA Editorial
Loaded term: propaganda. Hardly the mild descriptive tag of its origin, the word now invokes visions of cynical manipulation, grand conspiracies to turn entire populations against their own interests and against each other. Sure, plenty of coordination between bad actors …
Excerpt from In the Time of the Manaroans
Miro Bilbrough’s memoir, In the time of the Manaroans, is set in a remote countercultural milieu in Aotearoa in the late seventies.
The Surveyed Vision: 36 Meditations on 3 Books by Barry Hill (Peacemongers, Grass Hut Work and Reason & Lovelessness)
a. Justice is Barry Hill’s overarching leitmotiv.
Music Becomes Memory: What Listening to Music Does to the Poetic Voice
When I think about the music that’s closest to me, that’s an inextricable part of my identity in how unwaveringly I have carried it through time.
Fox Mask Children
Exactly one year ago, foxes appeared in the forests and towns around here for the first time. In muscular structures, trauma or damage to the fibres is the very condition of growth.
CREATURELY: In Praise of New Poetry from Aotearoa
We are living in uncanny, uncertain, and uneven times. It is difficult not to feel undone by it all.
A Poet’s Progress in the ABC: Reflections on a Life in Radio
On my job application to the ABC in 1983 I mentioned that I was a poet, even though the job advertised was for a purely technical position as a trainee sound engineer.
Anti-Doodles: a Dada-ist Game for Long Pandemic Afternoons
As 20th Century Europe erupted into the chaos of the Great War, Dadaists responded with art forms that reflected the fragmentation and the unintelligibility of the world around them.
On Speaking and Unheard Women: Interrogating Classical Silence in the Poetry of Anna Jackson and Helen Rickerby
When we meet Cassandra in Aeschylus’s ‘Agamemnon’ – this stolen princess, this famed beauty turned ill-starred prophet, hauled onstage as Agamemnon’s prize for victory over the Trojans – she is silent for 270 lines.
Motherhood, Language and the Everyday During the Poetry of Astrid Lorange, Amy Brown and L K Holt
For a long time after my daughter was born, I looked for representations of motherhood everywhere. I looked for it in casual interactions with other mothers in the park and on the street, I looked for it with friends, in mothers’ groups and on the screen.
Wrestling with Mode and Meaning: the Play of Poetry in Theatre
Sitting high in the John Golden Theatre on Broadway, the opening moments of Jeremy O Harris’s Slave Play leave me open-mouthed. A black woman, dressed simply and of another era – one might presume as a slave – enters the …
Net Carries Water
She’s balancing me on her hip, her bare feet sinking in the mud and her tiny denim shorts cutting across her dimpled thighs … She’s standing in front of a striped annex in a caravan park, somewhere in Far North …
Unearthing the Greek in the Australian: an Account of Owl Publishing’s History and Foundation
Poetry publishers are an essential staple of the poetry community. When their existence is challenged by funding cuts, blinkered economic rationalisation and misguided consumerism, poets rail – as we should. But when a publisher like Owl Publishing quietly states, it …
NO THEME IX Editorial
Amulet ‘This is not a Warning, it is a Threat! Happy new year!’ So tweeted the American President before launching a missile strike in Iran that almost began World War Three. The American President (for separate reasons) was impeached, and …
Never Be Alone Again: Hip-Hop Sampling as a Technique in Contemporary Australian Poetry
One of those most important battles of hip-hop’s first two decades wasn’t waged between two MCs at a cypher. And it wasn’t a couple of b-boy crews popping and locking at a block party. Instead, it pitted a hip-hop clown against a puffy-sleeved Irish balladeer.
EARTH Editorial
Why ‘Earth’? Because we are of it, because we are destroying it, because there is nowhere else. Because to think about anything else right now feels like dissociation. The theme of this special issue isn’t radical. It’s not political. It’s …
When Words Have No Equals: A Response to Lisa Robertson’s Thresholds: A Prosody of Citizenship
How far, then, is it possible to move beyond the confines of official languages, to find one’s voice? Is it possible to begin again, to reinvent oneself, and therefore change interactions with others, through language? Lisa Robertson certainly thinks so.
Colours of the Ground: How Local Pigments Seek Local Words
It was just a moment, a single moment, but it contained so much. The bubbly little Getz in front of me was definitively, synthetically red. It seemed fast too, and intent, so I got a surprise when at the end of the overtaking turn-out it stopped almost to a complete halt so that I could go by.
BAYT Editorial
In Arabic, ‘bayt’ means house and also a line of poetry. Welcome. I hope you enter and explore.
Dear White, It’s OK to be white
In October 2018, the motion ‘It’s OK to be white’ introduced in the Australian Parliament by White Supremacist Senator Pauline Hanson.
