Featured Stories
Australia’s lost literary sector
Non-fictionAs I’m writing this essay, at the start of 2026, nearly every arts, cultural and literary organisation in Australia is in some sort of trouble – whether at the hard-but-ticking-along-if-everything-stays-equal end of the scale or the other extreme: a not-sure-how-long-we-can-keep-going-like-this existential crisis.
As a case in point, the last few years have revealed the shocking frailty of Australia’s literary sector. In Victoria, for example, in December last year, dozens of literary journals, training and development organisations, festivals and prizes were told they’d lost multi-year state government funding – not only making a significant number of literary organisations unsustainable (and potentially unsalvageable) but also risking the state’s reputation as home to Australia’s first UNESCO City of Literature (Naarm/Melbourne) and only Booktown (Clunes).
But literature has always been the sector’s poorly funded cousin. These may be hard times, but things have always been hard. In a sector accustomed to deprivation, deprioritisation and crisis, why does the current state of Australia’s literary sector feel so different?
Shadow selves
IntroductionThis edition of Griffith Review considers all kinds of loss (and a few notable instances of its inverse). Losing something, of course, doesn’t have to
connote pain or strife: some of the essays and stories in this collection view loss as a beginning rather than an end, a shucking off of old selves or a reappraisal of old habits and ideas.
Bucket of water
Non-fictionWhen clients were brought to Australia, they were held in hotels or detention centres. Detainees were allowed to see external psychologists in visiting rooms in the detention centres. The rooms were stark and grey with bright, white lighting. I filled out an online application form to visit one of my clients. It asked me to list the items I wanted to bring with me, and how I intended to use each of them.
Latest Edition
Lost and Found
'Loss,' wrote Marcus Aurelius, 'is nothing else but change'. We lose face, lose time, lose heart, lose touch, lose ground, lose our keys (often); we can lose the things that hold us back or weigh us down, just as...Featured Collection
First Nations Perspectives
Where truths collide
I AM SITTING forward, in nautical terms, looking astern at my awa, who is guiding us through reefs and straits on a moonless night. Above him are stars like phosphorescence in the squid-ink sky. Around his silhouette I see phosphorescence like stars in our small dinghy’s wake. I’m a young man excited to be going night-spearing for kaiyar, the painted crayfish.
Speaking up
The modern Australian incarnation of truth-telling that emerged from the Uluru Statement from the Heart in 2017 came not from dictatorship and civil war, as had truth-telling in the Latin American ‘radical democracies’ of the 1990s, which pioneered transitional justice. Instead, it derived from local people devising local solutions.
The power of the First Nations Matriarchy
I WAS BORN from the world’s most ancient womb: the sacred womb of a First Nations woman. The blood pumping through my veins is the life force of a long line of First Nations Warrior Women whose spirits run deep into this ancient soil. It is a privilege to be raised in a culture that understands the power of the First Nations Matriarchy.
When the heart speaks
I had in mind what Australia should be as I wrote the book, a gift to the peoples’ movement for legal, political and structural change in this country – the movement to establish a constitutionally enshrined First Nations Voice to Parliament, as proposed in the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
The heart of seeding First Nations sovereignty
The demand for treaty – or, more accurately, the demand for many treaties – must be driven by the cultural authority of each sovereign First Nation. This process must be underpinned by cultural protocol and custom that recognises the many tribal clans within the First Nations.
The long road to Uluru
Uluru is a game changer. The response of ordinary Australians to the Statement has been overwhelming…a rallying call to the Australian people to “walk with us in a movement…for a better future”.
GR Online - Free to read
Cinema speaks back
ON 29 JANUARY 2024, the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (a key provider of emergency medical services and hospitals in Gaza) released audio of a five-year-old girl in a besieged neighbourhood of…
All my friends are getting EVs
I WAS WORKING out with my friend Matt when he asked if I wanted some coolant. Confused, I quipped darkly that I was depressed, not suicidal. Then I twigged –…
The motherload
I RECENTLY SENT my best friend a document titled ‘The Motherload’: a manual explaining how to be me in the event that I die, am incapacitated or sent to jail for killing my husband. It includes gems such as the food preferences of each of my children,…
A race to the bottom?
BEFORE HER RECENT interview with British novelist Julian Barnes, journalist Katie Razzall prompted an AI chatbot to pen an opening line in the author’s style, which read as follows: He…
Recent Editions
