Meanjin

My favourite book is Anna Karenina. In the dying days of Tsarist Russia, trains carried the force of modernity—the unstoppable symbol of a new age pressing against the old world. Trains were the technology that brought the future whether people wanted it or not. Now, when I step onto a long-distance train in Australia, it feels almost the reverse: an anachronism, a left-over from an earlier era. There’s a strange irony, therefore, in taking a train to give talks about artificial intelligence.

My favourite book is Anna Karenina. In the dying days of Tsarist Russia, trains carried the force of modernity—the unstoppable symbol of a new age pressing against the old world. Trains were the technology that brought the future whether people wanted it or not. Now, when I step onto a long-distance train in Australia, it feels almost the reverse: an anachronism, a left-over from an earlier era. There’s a strange irony, therefore, in taking a train to give talks about artificial intelligence.

In 2025, I spent a year exploring the four Stoic and Cardinal virtues: wisdom, moderation, justice and courage. Every week, I shared a post on Substack. This was part of a lifelong engagement with virtue traditions, and a personal quest for coherence. To live well in a fragmenting world without amplifying harmful patterns, was there something I could learn by turning not towards Eastern or indigenous traditions, but my own European past?

Reviewed: Here are My Demands, Andrew Roff, Wakefield Press At the centre of Andrew Roff’s science fiction novel Here Are My Demands is policy advisor Maggie Gurewal’s attempt at implementing a universal basic income in 2058 Australia, immediately following the election of the first progressive government in 19 years. Australia is now governed via plebiscite, with an emergent political class acting as voting proxies (harvesters).

Karen Fletcher is furious. She stands on an uneven picnic table and her legs shake as she addresses the few hundred people who have gathered with her to protest the demolition of the public housing tower that reaches toward the sky behind her. Fletcher is the CEO of Flat Out, a Victorian advocacy service for criminalised women, trans, and gender diverse people, and public housing is one of the few options available to those who the organisation supports.

Reviewed: The Wallace Line: A Poem, Jennifer Mackenzie, Transit Lounge The Wallace Line is a faunal boundary line in the Indo-Australian Archipelago. Drawn in the mid-nineteenth century by the English naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, it cuts through the Indian Ocean between Bali and Lombok, upwards into the Makassar Strait between Borneo and Celebes, and eastward—south of Mindanao—into the Philippine Sea. At its thinnest point, the line measures just 35 kilometres.

Reviewed: Plastic Budgie, Olivia De Zilva, Pink Shorts Press The debut offering from Olivia De Zilva is a bildungsroman that sits somewhere between autobiography and fiction—a fragmented, although chronological, account of a young girl’s (also named Olivia) becoming. Plastic Budgie is sectioned into three parts: ‘The Past’, ‘The Present’, and ‘The Ammonite’. As the book traces Olivia’s memories, she grapples with the present and ultimately reaches an epiphany.

Reviewed: Cannon, Lee Lai, Giramondo Like her award-winning 2021 debut Stone Fruit, Lai’s latest graphic novel Cannon wastes no time easing readers in. Lai drops us right into the mess—literally. The opening scene is pure chaos, tables overturned, plates shattered, a restaurant in shambles. The culprit is the graphic novel’s titular protagonist, Cannon, aided and abetted by Trish, her best friend. But this chaos is only the prologue. Lai quickly rewinds to reveal how Cannon ends up here.

Karen Fletcher is furious. She stands on an uneven picnic table and her legs shake as she addresses the few hundred people who have gathered with her to protest the demolition of the public housing tower that reaches toward the sky behind her. Fletcher is the CEO of Flat Out, a Victorian advocacy service for criminalised women, trans, and gender diverse people, and public housing is one of the few options available to those that the organisation supports.

1     I have never written a poetry review. Performance poetry, which is what Pi was best known for in the seventies, was often ephemeral. Since then I have bought and read his big books, which account for his getting the Patrick White award. Indeed I went along to that occasion, as a run-on from the many friendly street-corner conversations we’ve had. 2      My remark about Fitzroy, which Pi has made his patch, was to show that other non-Indigenous people also had valid associations with it.