Meanjin

‘In Sydney if you have something to say you hold a party; in Melbourne you start a journal,’ quipped the poet and critic Vincent Buckley in 1962. Buckley was an acute, astringent observer of the literary culture of the two cities. An outsider in both, he recognised Melbourne’s characteristic voice – ‘earnest, do-gooding, voluble’ – in the leftish humanism of its leading literary journals, Clem Christesen’s Meanjin and Stephen Murray-Smith’s Overland. Not for Melbourne the anarchic frenzies of the Bulletin, the Sydney Push and Oz. While Sydney had the best poets, Buckley contended that the southern capital had the most influential opinion makers.

Roland Barthes called language our second skin: ‘I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.’ Which should make the latest Meanjin, ‘On love, sex and desire’, a veritable Kama Sutra of literary massage. Yet it opens, perversely enough, with a denunciation of the erotic. John Armstrong’s honest, elegant and sharply self-critical essay recounts an early sexual experience during a brief trip to Paris. Giving his father the slip one morning, the teenager snuck off and spent his money on a prostitute. Afterwards he wandered the streets, full of loathing: ‘I was wicked, stupid, naïve, vile, corrupt, irresponsible, thick, wasteful, out of control, nasty, brutish.’

In the winter issue of Meanjin, some of Australia’s best writers, including Sophie Cunningham, Lucy Treloar, and Jennifer Mills, grapple with the climate emergency and our relationship to place in these days of coronavirus and the summer that was.

The narrator of David Malouf’s virtuosic ‘A Traveller’s Tale’ (1982) describes Queensland’s far north as ‘a place of transformations’ and unwittingly provides us with an epigraph for this collection. Without doubt, every story selected from ....

The current issue of Meanjin is a forthright one. In her editorial, Sally Heath singles out the contributions of Marcia Langton and Darren Siwes, and with good reason: their work typifies the issue. Siwes has given the journal its cover, and his choice of image – a coin depicting an Indigenous head of state in the year 2041 – makes its point. The cornerstone of the issue is, however, ‘Reading the Constitution out Loud’, a thorough and level-headed essay by Langton on Julia Gillard’s promise to hold a referendum on the recognition of Indigenous Australians in the Constitution. Langton, a member of the government’s inquiry panel, whose matter-of-fact style leads the way for the rest of theissue, asks, ‘how can we sustain the opportunity for a referendum […] in circumstances that are not riven by “dog whistle” issues in the racialist Australian politics that arise with each electoral season?’ The question cannot be ignored, nor easily answered.

There is something to offend everyone in the latest issue of Meanjin. Several contributors boldly tackle religious questions – always plenty of kindling for the fire there. Jeff Sparrow takes on the so-called ‘New Atheists’, in the process throwing a few Marxist haymakers at Bush, Rudd and ‘the Israeli apartheid state’. The ‘religious undergirding’ of secular thought is considered by the Sydney academic John Potts, who finds that greenies, old-style lefties and post-structuralists are much closer to Messianic Christianity than they might think (along the way, he is snide about vegetarians, too). Elsewhere, Paul Mitchell contrasts the spiritual impulses at work in contemporary Australian fiction, though some of his assumptions are bound to get nonbelievers offside.

The new Meanjin, edited by Sophie Cunningham, is exciting to behold. With its varied font, though, it runs the risk of being like Federation Square: striking to look at but difficult to negotiate. The small, faint font made this issue taxing to read. Perhaps younger readers, targeted by some of the content (such as the serialisation of a graphic history), will have less difficulty.