Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
Edited by Jonathan Green, Melbourne University Publishing, $24.99.
Some fascinating analogies are highlighted in this edition during the COVID-19 pandemic, another time of “high anxiety and, yes, living through our own moment of tension and strife”.
As editor Jonathan Green points out: we had been “bracing for the slow assault of climate change and wondering at the cynical obfuscations that denied it … And then a pandemic; trouble thrown on a sea of troubles…”
In the ediorial, Green says it was war when this magazine was created 80 years ago. Geographically war was remote when the first edition of Meanjin was published in December 1940. At this time, we have no idea how this ends, only that a new era with the interrelated hallmarks of pandemic and environmental duress is upon us.
“Maybe there is a growing sense of nothing to lose. Are we turning slowly toward thoughts that in other times might have cleaved too close to the bone? Now, as in 1940, our minds are open to the possibilities they might create.”
Volume 79.3 contains a fine collection of writing “from our Covid moment”. One is from Jack Latimore, Through a Mask, Breathing is an expansive, lyrical essay that couples a local response to the Black Lives Matter movement.
“The death of George Floyd at the hands of police during a roadside arrest in Minneapolis for his alleged use of a counterfeit $20 bill had escalated into a social uprising around the globe. The parallels of Floyd’s death and the 2015 death in custody of 26-year-old Dunghutti man David Dungay Jr were distinctive, right down to the final, fearful, frantic words of the two men…”
Kate Grenville charts the troubled progress and unexpected insights of days under lockdown; Fiona Wright finds space and rare pleasures as the world closes in; Krissy Kneen takes on the sudden obsession with ‘iso-weight’; Justin Clemens searches for hope in the world of verse; Desmond Manderson and Lorenzo Veracini consider viruses, colonialism and other metaphors; and there’s short fiction from Anson Cameron, The Miserable Creep of Covid.
Together Alone Writing the pandemic also has ideas around gentrification, St Kilda, Sidney Nolan and the life and music of Archie Roach, all of it set against the quiet menace of the pandemic.
