Meanjin

Ross Gibson Volume 68, Number 2, 2009 we two were talking about who should be first.1 -Patyegarang to Dawes, late 1791(?) PRETEXT In January 1788 William Dawes came to Botany Bay with the First Fleet Marines. For most of the intervening years until now, he has missed out on close historical attention because his papers were presumed destroyed by family neglect and a hurricane in Antigua during the nineteenth century.

Head to the Pilliga Scrub this week with two extraordinary observers of Australia, its landscapes, histories and potential futures. Originally published in 2016, "Changescapes" travels with Ross Gibson as Gibson travels with Eric Rolls in the quest to "graft" Rolls' mighty environmental volume A Million Wild Acres into a film.

we two were talking about who should be first.1 -Patyegarang to Dawes, late 1791(?) PRETEXT In January 1788 William Dawes came to Botany Bay with the First Fleet Marines. For most of the intervening years until now, he has missed out on close historical attention because his papers were presumed destroyed by family neglect and a hurricane in Antigua during the nineteenth century.

I once spent some wondrous months in the Pilliga Scrub, a vast scree of native Australian forest gone feral in north-west New South Wales. I was working with John Cruthers, Joel Peterson and Eric Rolls, grafting a film out of Eric's marvelous vast scree of a book, A Million Wild Acres.[i] One afternoon Eric took me unusually deep into the forest, proffering the chance to meet a white man we will call Muller, whom I had heard about and whom Eric had met a couple of times.

Mounted into sockets in my skull are two prime lenses. They are 35mm, a focal length that mimics the field of view of the human eye, according to photographers. What my prime lenses see is recorded on a memory card (my brain) for easy recall later. Then, rather than roll these memories back to myself like a movie, my imagination presents them to me as a series of stills. Frozen moments that I can spend time inside, to notice things. Which is kind of handy when you're a writer. Here's the strange part.

This week's Reading Trail in support of ABC-RN's imminent Top 100 Australian Books poll revisits Helen Garner's appreciation of the work of Elizabeth Jolley . In this overview, published in the winter of 1983, Garner celebrates Jolley's humour, her pathos, and the images she returns to, "so industrious but never threadbare".

Meanjin is open again for subscriptions! Thank you all for your patience as we've undertaken the transfer of the journal to its new home. The next edition of Meanjin will be available from December 2026. Information on the purchase of single editions - in print or ePub formats - will be available closer to time. To stay in touch with our latest news, please sign up here.

This week's ABC Radio National Top-100-adjacent trail heads down the Booker pathway.

The Meanjin team 10 December 2018 was the 45-year anniversary of Patrick White being awarded the Nobel Prize for 'an epic and psychological narrative art which has introduced a new continent into literature.' Below you'll find a selection of White's own writings from the pages of Meanjin curated to celebrate that anniversary, and discussions of his work by others. Fiction Essays Poetry You may also enjoy these recent essays.

In October 1973, Australian novelist Patrick White was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. This week's reading trail heads back to 1957, when White published an extract from Voss, his fifth novel, in Meanjin, volume 16, no. 3. This book, a fictionalised telling of the story of Prussian naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt, follows the expeditions of White's explorer - Johan Ulrich Voss - into and across the Australian continent after his meeting in Sydney with a young woman, Laura Trevelyan.