Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
Edited by Jonathan Green, Melbourne University Publishing, $24.99.
Meanjin’s Spring edition 2021 gives good cause to reflect. Editor Jonathan Green acknowledges we are living in an information era, but not all of it is created equally.
“In the thick of Meanjin’s 80th year, it seems a moment to wonder at the role of a magazine like this, to think about its place in the spectrum of public ideas.”
“Meanjin’s execution of that duty may have been imperfect over its 80 years, but in its contemporary incarnation, the magazine’s task is simply to reflect the literary insights of the Australian culture as it is … in all its diverse interests and identities. In its way that is a small and radical act. In its way it is also the least that can be done.”
It can also be said that if media addresses public affairs … then it serves an increasingly significant social purpose. The subjects of the Meanjin essays speak volumes.
Queensland academic, Munanjahli and South Sea Islander woman Chelsea Watego writes impressively on the necessity of ‘walking away’ from colonial institutions and constructs, in order to find the truth of individual and collective power as an Indigenous Australian. It is, she argues, a fight against the very notion of race itself: “We must stand in our own power, for it is only in knowing ours that we know the false claims of theirs. This is black power.”
“I’ve never been too impressed with the metaphoric mountain-top that Black race scholars and civil rights activists have typically been concerned with, of a promised land and a dream . . .”
Other contributors see Tom Griffiths painting a lingering portrait of the “humble Australian bushman”; Patrick Allington writing on how Swedish artist Hilma af Klint “has intruded upon my inner world and become a sort of guiding light”; and Amal Awad surveys the world of romance novels for signs of orientalism and “sheikh-lit”.
As well, Yumna Kassab writes on colonialism, conquest, occupation and dispossession: the modern Australian story; Ron Radford on the early colonial art in Tasmania; Prithvi Varatharajan on literary engagements with the non-human world; and Rachael Weaver on currawongs.
