Meanjin Vol 83, No 1

By Esther Anatolitis

Poetry is where Meanjin began, and Autumn 2024 is Meanjin’s first with new Poetry Editor Jeanine Leane — be sure to include this issue in your collection! There’s Tom Doig on ‘Ten years on from Hazelwood: last decade’s second-worst disaster’. Marcus Westbury reconfiguring capitalism in ‘The agency and the equity’. A venturous interview with Peter Polites. Elise Dowden’s joyful ‘Australia in Three Books’ on national treasure π.O.. André Dao’s superb ‘State of the (Writing) Nation’ oration. A Clare Wright memoir piece that packs a powerful punch. And plenty more fiction, memoir, essays, reviews and experiments. All framed by this season’s Meanjin Paper by Arrernte Elder Theresa Penangke Alice: ‘Ilkakelheme akngakelheme — resisting assimilation’. In heavy times, we read with heavy hearts, and reflect with open minds. Embrace Australia’s finest writers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Mar 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9780522880540

Book preview

EDITORIAL

Esther Anatolitis

Σταθία Αvατολίτη

Stopping to watch the ancestors dance. Rethinking Australia, reconfiguring capitalism, putting out fires. Loose buttons and lost contact lenses. Trickle-down predators. On the day that the clouds are black, the heavy rain falls like silver. What compels you? What moves you? What radicalises you? What do you imagine you would have done in those circumstances? Giving form, cooking and dreaming, meeting at the threshold. Lightness and water and breathtaking love. The year in truth-telling. Writing for the future. You know how to dance. Just dance.

Poetry is where Meanjin began, and with every issue we reinvigorate the ways we ‘talk poetry’. With this issue we welcome award-winning Wiradjuri poet and editor Jeanine Leane as Poetry Editor. Jeanine is editor of Guwayu – For All Times: A Collection of First Nations Poems. Her first volume of poetry, Dark Secrets After Dreaming: A.D. 1887–1961, won the Scanlon Prize for Indigenous Poetry. Her first novel, Purple Threads, won the David Unaipon Award. Our warmest thanks to Bronwyn Lea, Poetry Editor from Meanjin 75.1 Autumn 2016 up to the last issue of last year, for the many hundreds of poems she has brought to Meanjin readers with such expert dedication.

Vol. 83 No. 1 is also Tess Smurthwaite’s last as Deputy Editor & Fiction Editor, the critical role she’s held since Vol. 76 No. 2. One of Australia’s most admired editors, Tess has developed the work of countless writers with great care. Across seven years our hearts have glowed as we’ve read through her selections— look out for her final selections in our next edition—and we are all the richer for her profound commitment to Australian fiction.

Life and death. Moments of decision. Family, inequity, memory, destruction, agency.

Speak up against genocide. A mute voice has no echo. We do not honour the dead by emulating their silence. We cannot honour the living unless we are all safe.

Let’s not take our eyes off Gaza. Let’s stand up for oppressed people. Let’s stand strong against oppression.

This is why we champion tenacious work. This is why we’re here together. This is why you’re embracing some of Australia’s finest writers.

This is why.

In heavy times, we read with heavy hearts, and reflect with open minds.

• • •

STATE OF THE NATION

Place my hands in the water

Phoebe Grainer

Phoebe Grainer is a Djungan and Muluridji writer and actor, and a recipient of the Dreaming Award. This year, she will be featured in Povo: Stories on Class and her play will premiere with ILBIJERRI and Melbourne Theatre Company.

Rain fell on my spirit and buried it somewhere in the dirt. It’s eight days post-referendum. This morning, my mother and grandmother want to walk. This is my mother’s doing, I know it. Since ‘the night’, my mother, being the healer that she is, has been busying herself bringing everyone together. My nana, well, I haven’t seen much of her lately. Thinking about it now… haven’t left this house since…

Early morning means a crescent moon still smiles. Under it, my grandmother stands waiting at the fence. Mum closes the front door of the house and I walk with her to meet Nana. We don’t say anything, and we know that’s different because most of the time I can’t shut my mouth. But what is there to say? All we can do is move.

Nana’s eyes are in the sky, studying what’s to come. Mum’s eyes are off to the side, as though she’s thinking about how she might help someone today. My eyes, they’re watching us from above. I’m upside down, walking on the clouds. At any moment I’m gonna fall through and end up somewhere in the stars. Not too bad a place to be in, the stars. Just means that I wouldn’t be here.

Stuck on the clouds, all I can do is watch the world play out. I’m not a part of it and the world doesn’t want me to be a part of it and that’s not a new thought. Nana walks and Mum and I move with her. Nana’s the evening and morning star—all you want to do is be around her. Her eyes are still in the sky, she sees something I can’t. Maybe she can see me up there.

Dogs bark and birds sing out as we walk together. We walk through street by street, circling the whole of our town. People keep coming here, getting away from the city. But if you ask me, I think it’s change that they’re running from. Most of the town is asleep, all warm in their small houses. Deep oranges in the sky are fighting to rise up and the birds are louder than ever.

The TV was loud when we watched this country vote No. I get a sharp pain in my stomach and my ears hurt and I feel dizzy. ‘They’re not gonna vote for us’ and Illustration by Lee Lai ‘It’s not the same is it, you look at them and it’s different, you know they voted No’ and ‘Nothing gonna change’ and… Mum’s and Nana’s voices play in my head over and over. I don’t want to think about the referendum.

I voted Yes, why couldn’t everyone else? Why do they even get a choice? I thought it would be different. Right now, I want to fall through the clouds. I want to fall down and move along the starry river into new galaxies, new worlds, maybe find a new world that’s just for me and people like me. We continue to walk in silence. Everything will stay the same I suppose?

Cars start to move and the sun is beginning to wake up the sky. I hoped. I really believed that we could have something different. Nana walked out of the lounge on referendum night. She didn’t want to watch it. She’s seen more than one referendum in her lifetime. That hope… was magical. Now that magic is gone somewhere in this earth with my spirit.

I look down at the dirt—red and brown grass spikes up. All that is left inside me is sadness, loss and most of all anger—burning my stomach. I kick at the dirt. I kick it again and again. I feel like I can’t stop. What makes me angry the most was my hope. Dust rises at my feet. Mum and Nana stop to look at me. Their eyes soften but they don’t say anything and I stand there in the red dirt with brown grass—spiritless.

Nana’s heard something, she turns her head and looks towards the trees. She slowly takes her shoes off and walks barefoot. Mum does the same behind her.

We’re in the valley and we walk along Old River now… but there’s no water. Mum used to swim in here, she said it was flowing and full. Nana lifts and places her feet gently on the dry ground as she walks… she doesn’t want to hurt the Old River.

I’m drowning. That rain is pouring on my spirit. I have to find it, my spirit, it is somewhere in this dirt.

Mum didn’t move once from the couch when the referendum was on TV, she didn’t say much then either. I hovered near the hallway, not wanting to face what the TV was saying.

The grass is grown wild, higher than us. We weave through the tall grass. Nana’s feet touch the earth delicately, each step intentional. I can hear water. Nana walks faster and I look toward the sound. A stream flows from the tall grass. Nana steps into the water, it’s clear and sparkly. The sun is out now and I can feel its glow. Nana walks up the stream and Mum slowly follows. I watch with my shoes on.

I’m on that cloud, upside down, watching the world alone. I bend down and place my hands in the water. It’s soft and cool. I can barely see Mum and Nana as they are further up the stream now. I look at myself from above where I stand in the clouds. I don’t want to be up there.

I take off my shoes and socks, placing my feet on the ground. Blue electrical currents connect my feet with the earth. Zap! Tingles spread throughout my body. I breathe in through my nose, deep. The water is deep and smells sweet… like dragonflies, wind, rocks and Country. The earth is hugging me.

I step into the stream and walk. I follow the water and it connects to the Old River. The Old River is flowing, alive. Splash! Mum swashes water on me. I look at Mum, she stares at me with cheeky eyes. Splash! Nana kicks water at Mum wetting her across her body. Mum looks even more shocked than me. We all look at each—our eyes full with Ancestors. We laugh. Me, Mum and Nana, we laugh. Splash! Splash! Splash! We splatter water at each other. Splash! Splash! Splash! Old River’s belly rumbles and shakes, laughing with us. The wind joins in laughing, blowing life into me, into us.

I’m not upside down; I’m here. The blue currents from the earth wash over my body like chain lightning. I can feel again… feeling coming back to me. My spirit. I’m here! I laugh so hard I can barely breathe and tears swell in my eyes and I let out a big cry. Mum and Nana rush to me, tears falling, soaked bodies hugging. We cry, holding each other tight.

There’s an Old Tree. On the Old Hill next to Old River. We walk up and slowly sit under the Old Tree. We’re still soaked but it doesn’t matter. We’re all sitting looking out on the Old Valley. Old River. Oldest sun. This is Country and no one can take Country away from us. Country is me. Country is Mum. Country is Nana. Country is here.

Country will always look after us.

• • •

There is no beginning

Na’ama Carlin

Dr Na’ama Carlin is a sociologist living on unceded Bidjigal land, with her partner and bub. She is a founding Advisory Committee member of the Jewish Council of Australia.

There is no singular beginning to this piece. To start by telling the story of events that occurred on a single date is to begin with a sense of a specific beginning. Yet history does not have a definitive starting point, and as I am writing about Gaza, about Palestine, about Israel, about war and settler-colonialism and intergenerational trauma, we could place our finger anywhere on the topographical map of our collective pain and say: ‘start here’, and even then, we would not have the whole story.

So, let’s start here.

It is 2 am in late November, and I’m sitting in the dark living room of my apartment in Sydney, a place that also charts the connection, pride, pain and unceded sovereignty of Indigenous peoples. My partner and child are asleep. I cannot sleep. Israel has resumed bombing in Gaza after a brief period of respite. It says it has done so after a Hamas assailant murdered two Israelis outside Jerusalem in an attack. The conditions of the ceasefire were broken, Israel claims. The ceasefire had expired anyway.

My problem with numbers is that they do not capture the immensity of this violence. Numbers force us to begin or end at an arbitrary point. When I first began writing this piece, for instance, the death toll in Gaza was 12,000. Now, as I sit down to edit, the death toll is 15,500. I’m now doing final edits to this piece: we are over 100 days into the war and the death toll is 25,000. There is no doubt that by the time this journal reaches your hands, this number will be surpassed.

Even these numbers in their magnitude do not capture that the killing of Palestinians and decimation of Gaza is continuing every minute at a rate beyond comprehension: how many days have gone by? Where did it start? Where do we begin to count the pain? To count the bodies, the bombs, the hospitals, the devastated schools and refugee camps? How can we calculate the amount of safe water left, or petrol, or flour, or trucks with aid, or drones with missiles? The rate of loss is unfathomable, a thriving city bombed into literal ruins.

Some things are impossible to enumerate. Ten thousand children, for instance. How do we calculate that? Ten thousand children, and each is a whole world, a star shining at the centre of a constellation, but we know that the other lights have been extinguished too. Ten thousand children. How do we enumerate their hopes, now also lost? Their laughter? Ten thousand futures wiped off this earth with unfathomable cruelty. The pain is beyond anything that I can comprehend. It is simply too much.

In the meantime, it has taken months of persistent public pressure for the Australian Parliament to finally call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Even though 99% of those massacred in Gaza have been civilians. Even though no matter what number of casualties I write here, tomorrow it will have increased. Two days after the so-called ceasefire ended in November and Israel’s relentless bombing of Gaza resumed, Israel’s bombs murdered hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza. Journalists remaining there took to social media to post that they’ve accepted that they’ll soon be killed. Their fears are not unfounded. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Israel has killed at least 83 journalists in Gaza (so far). I read and share each post and the horror is lodged in my chest. How high does the pile of bodies need to rise before it is enough?

In Parliament, the conversation is rarely about Palestine and any Palestinian right to life and self-determination. Members of Parliament, including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, talk about antisemitism and impress on the Jewish community that they affirm our need for safety. ‘All Australians embrace you in this time of trauma’, Albanese has told us. ‘We hold you in our hearts.’

True, there is an increase in antisemitism in Australia, which coincides with an increase in Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian racism and anti-Arab racism. Rates of antisemitic incidents rise each time Israel pummels Palestinians. Israel projects itself as a representative of all Jews and claims to be a ‘Jewish State’. This makes it difficult, and indeed impossible for some, to distinguish between Judaism and Zionism, such that Jewish people worldwide are easily viewed as representatives of Israel and thus targeted over Israel’s actions. This is equally true of Jewish people whose identity is so entangled with Zionism that they refuse to accept the legitimacy of anti-Zionism as a Jewish disposition. Arguably, Israel’s government wants this to be the case, and it benefits from this conflation.

The increase of antisemitism feeds into the Zionist narrative that Jews are unsafe in diaspora, which is why we need Israel, the only place Jews can be safe. In other words, the conflation of Zionism with Judaism serves the Zionist cause. It is a cynical use of Jewish pain to justify and legitimate Zionism’s existence: it isn’t about the safety of Jews but about the maintenance and hegemony of the Israeli state. To put it bluntly, Zionism does not make Jewish people safe.

As war wages on Gaza, Antonio Gramsci’s words echo: ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’ By this Gramsci means that the existing hegemonic order is crumbling, and rulers face a crisis of legitimacy. We see this in the millions of people across the world who take to the streets each week and demonstrate in solidarity with Gaza and Palestine, while our elected leaders sit in their political fortresses and find new and perverse ways to explain why the decision to avoid pressuring Israel to halt its assault in Gaza is actually advantageous. The new world is splitting from the old, and we are witnessing the most morbid symptoms conceivable: genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Also split is the Jewish community, and our difference is rooted in shared trauma. There are those who resurrect the memory of pogroms and the Shoah to justify Israel’s violence, and those who can locate our resistance in these same experiences. In a twisted irony, the governments of both France and Germany have recently gone so far as to claim that Israel can’t be accused of genocide because of the history of the Jewish people—the implication being that if you’ve been victim of a genocide then you can’t be found to have committed one. Consequently, Israel continues its assault with impunity from the Global North.

I find it impossible to reconcile Jewish identity with those who would sanctify the massacre of innocent people in the name of Jewish safety. The chasm deepens. Many left-wing Jews have become isolated from our communities and families, who insist that recognising Palestinian suffering is to erase the violence committed against Israelis by Hamas. Seeing us attend Palestine solidarity protests, they charge us with fomenting antisemitism, as if liberation is such an alien value in Judaism that they cannot comprehend its extension to anyone but Jews.

History tells us that struggle is connected, and that standing with oppressed people is a call to remedy the world of its harm, articulated in the Jewish principle of tikkun olam. Author Michael Richmond writes, ‘Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, whose association with world Jewry is made constantly inextricable by Zionists— Jewish and non-Jewish—marks a fundamental breach between those who want Jews and everyone to live free from oppression and violence, and those who prioritise a settler-colonial citadel and its ineluctable alliances with imperialists and fascists the world over.’ Australia’s broad government support of Israel’s war reveals its priorities and alliances. Australia, as a settler-colony, has vested interest in upholding the legitimacies of the colonial system. It is not a surprise that countries that have lived experience of colonial violence, such as South Africa, Ireland, Cuba, Algeria, and Colombia (to name a few) are staunch political supporters of Palestine.

It is no simple task to address the chasm that breaks our world. I’m reminded of the concept of Shevirat ha-Kelim (Breaking of the Vessels) in Lurianic Kabbalah, which describes God’s creation of the world by a shattering of vessels that contained Divine energy. This is a story of beginning and chaos, it speaks of an unsettled time, but also of an ultimate beginning. It is the Jewish mystical mirror to Gramsci’s quote above. It is up to us to create the conditions for remedying the breakage and making the vessels whole.

However, the vessels seem further than ever from repair. We see morbid symptoms reproduced in a truly macabre fashion. Regularly I’m asked about the ‘rising rates of antisemitism’ and whether I am afraid. And yes—I am. I’m afraid of my son growing up as a Jewish person in a country that does not distinguish between Judaism and Zionism, and of being forced to reckon with the horrific violence that the Israeli state claims is being done in his name and in the name of Jews everywhere. I’m afraid that so many people, Jews included, assume that Israel acts in his (and our) interests, as it continues its decades-long occupation.

I’m afraid of the future that’s in store, with our elected politicians allowing the ethnic cleansing and yes—genocide—of Palestinians to go on with impunity. Not only impunity, but ostensible endorsement. I’m afraid of a world that does not speak up in the face of genocide, after it once said Never Again. ‘Israel has the right to self-defence,’ they parrot, repeating the line over and over. Do Palestinians, who have lived under an oppressive occupation, under apartheid, have the right to self-defence? Do the 2.3 million people living in restrictive conditions in Gaza, such that it has been termed the world’s biggest open-air prison, have the right to self-defence? The hypocrisy knows no bounds.

My child is throwing a tantrum, and I am tired. A friend sends me a link to a tweet: a journalist has taken a video of the abandoned Al-Nasr Children’s Hospital in northern Gaza, with some beds containing the decomposing bodies of infants, one of which has insects crawling on its chest. In early November, Israel’s military turned its focus on a ground assault in northern Gaza, and the hospital’s staff and critically ill patients were forced to evacuate. We all watched the videos where hospital staff pleaded human rights organisations for help evacuating the neonatal and paediatric intensive care units. We heard the testimony of staff about snipers targeting the building and patients. We watched the videos of them leaving the hospital after being forcibly evacuated. And now, we witness those who couldn’t leave. Something breaks in me this moment and I grab on to my screaming child and sob. The utter cruelty of being made to leave this earth more slowly and painfully than when you entered it and being made to endure it alone. Your screams unanswered. How confused you must be. How cold. How terrified. How painful must your breaths be, as they’re gulped into your tiny screaming lungs, how thirsty and hungry and scared you must feel. It is fucking unbearable.

When our child was born, he remained in the special care unit of the neonatal intensive care unit for several weeks, and each day that my partner and I came home from our visit our heart shattered. We knew our child was looked after, and yet, being apart was a brutal beginning to our life as a family. We couldn’t wait until each long night ended and we could fill our arms with his small body again the next day. I think of these babies’ parents, who will never have the opportunity to fill their arms with tiny wailing bodies. Something is deeply broken in the world if we cannot find our shared humanity over the grief of a child.

For all this, I am a believer in a shared humanity, and believe that solidarity with an oppressed peoples is to stand with all people. Our struggle is shared, and our liberation is collective. And to those who insist Jews should shackle our pain and solidarity only to that felt by other Jews, I respond with these words from the Jewish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg:

Why do you come to me with your special Jewish sorrows? I am just as much concerned with the poor victims on the rubber plantations of Putumayo, the Blacks in Africa with whose corpses the Europeans play catch […] they resound with me so strongly that I have no special place in my heart for the ghetto. I feel at home in the entire world, wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears.

While some erroneously dismiss her as a ‘self-hating Jew’, I conclude with Luxemburg’s words for this reason: Luxemburg experienced and fought antisemitism, yet she never thought of her experience as a Jewish woman to be exceptional. Pain, suffering, hope, humanity, and revolution are universal and do not necessitate the safety of one peoples to the exclusion of others.

We are not free until all of us are free.

• • •

Palestine as liberatory praxis

Sara M Saleh

Sara M Saleh is a writer, human rights lawyer, organiser, and the daughter of migrants from Palestine, Egypt and Lebanon. Her novel Songs for the Dead and the Living and poetry collection The Flirtation of Girls are out now.

If I must die,

you must live

to tell my story

As I write, it’s hard not to think of Palestinian poet Dr Refaat Alareer and this line of his. I have been thinking a lot of him, of the Heba Abu Nadas and Roshdi Sarrajs, the creatives, the journalists, the truth-tellers; of the archives that were bombed, the universities and the libraries that were bombed, the museums and the cultural centres and the hammam—all bombed to concrete confetti. These aren’t just crimes against humanity, they are crimes against history, as Ibram X Kendi writes.

The Israeli regime deliberately targets those whose work is to articulate a people: those asserting our existence as Israel denies and erases it, those telling our story as Israel tries to prevent or rewrite it—to disrupt any version of history that does not glorify its hunt¹ of the ‘human animals’.²

The ‘Australian’ landscape has not been spared from this exercise in cultural persecution, its veins extending globally. This country is fertile ground given its history. Late last year we saw hysteria when three actors were draped in kufiyahs at curtain call: board resignations, apologies, petitions, cancelled performances, cancelled subscriptions, and Sky News-esque media commentary. The pandering response of Sydney Theatre Company (STC) seemed more concerned with donor retention, showing a complete lack of regard for artists’ needs and safety. This followed earlier actions in solidarity with Palestine from actors including Violette Ayad at closing curtain of STC’s Oil, and by several others during performances of The Visitors, a co-production between STC and First Nations-led Moogahlin Performing