The many tragedies of Animorphs

If you read a couple of the books themselves or watched the Nickelodeon TV show, then you might have some vague memories of cool but simple stories about teenagers transforming into animals to fight evil aliens. If you read most or all of them, then I’d be willing to bet Animorphs seared itself permanently into the fabric of your being, that the name Tobias makes your heart seize up, and that the words ‘you mattered’ threaten to reduce you to tears.

Subject, object

The vivid hues and spiky leaves of Jason Moad’s Temple of Venus – the arresting artwork featured on the cover of Griffith Review 89: Here Be Monsters – raises a tantalisingly sinister proposition. The subject of the painting is clear – a Venus flytrap, realistically rendered – but there’s a somewhat otherworldly quality to this plant, a sense that it might be biding its time, waiting to strike while we, the viewers, are distracted by its beauty. For Melbourne-based realist painter Jason Moad, this slippage between subject and object, reality and imagination, is part of the point.

Real monsters

The language of horror, with its ability to conjure the unthinkable, to trace the contours of our deepest fears and darkest imaginings, can lead us into those shadowy corners of the human psyche, giving us permission to peer into the gloomy space under the bed or creak open the door to the basement. It allows us to sit with the uncertainties of life.

Operation Totem

In the 1950s and 1960s, hundreds of atmospheric and underground tests were conducted in Australia, with devastating consequences for First Nations peoples and for the military personnel involved in the tests. And yet the debate about Peter Dutton’s plan to put Australia on a nuclear track barely mentioned this calamity, or indeed the deep antipathy towards all things nuclear to which it gave rise. Struggling to put Dutton’s policy in context, one looked in vain for even a passing reference to Dr Helen Caldicott, Moss Cass or Uncle Kevin Buzzacott; to the Campaign Against Nuclear Energy or the Uranium Moratorium group; to the seamen’s boycott of foreign nuclear warships in Melbourne in 1986; to the massive antinuclear marches of the 1970s and 1980s; to Kupa Piti Kungka Tjuta and its resistance to the dumping of radioactive waste. Indeed, one looked in vain for any sense of nuclear as a uniquely dangerous technology, or of the ‘deadly connection’ (as Jim Falk called it) between uranium mining, nuclear reactors and the development of thermonuclear weapons.

A nation’s right to remember

In a 2023 article published in The Guardian, the Australian War Memorial’s newly appointed chair, Kim Beazley, acknowledged, ‘We do have to have a proper recognition of the frontier conflict.’ In an interview with Beazley on the ABC’s 7.30, journalist Laura Tingle reported that of the 27,000 metres of new space in the expansion, the pre-colonial gallery, which includes the Frontier Wars, would make up less than 2 per cent, and asked, ‘Will that be sufficient?’ Beazley’s reply was, again, ‘we need to have that recognition around the country’, while he emphasised that other institutions should play a role in the telling of Australia’s Frontier Wars. A charismatic sidestep.

The coward

At the beginning of my research, I knew little about Anne. I knew that my aunt had been married to an Anglican reverend. I knew she was Dad’s half-sibling, from my grandfather Staniforth Ricketson’s first marriage. I knew that she lived in the country at Mount Macedon. The final thing I knew for certain: my aunt died a sad and violent death. She perished on 16 February 1983, the night of the Ash Wednesday bushfires. Her husband, the Reverend Bill Carter, drove away from their cottage without her. In his panic, he left his wife behind and saved himself as the flames closed in.

Man’s Labyrinth

Max Weber foresaw the iron cage of rationalisation coming for us all: that industry and its social institutions would become so technically efficient that a worker would become a ‘specialist without spirit’ and a consumer a ‘sensualist without heart’. People could have everything they’d ever wanted, in theory, but the cost would be their humanity.

Weber conceived of this as a prison of capital when workers were in factories and those factories increasingly required employees to take on smaller and more specialised roles. This stretched into the bureaucratic sinew of large businesses and corporations, naturally, and into the administration of states, municipalities and even sufficiently large Zonta clubs.

The fire this time

When I think about this period now I see that my life has been one long exercise in walking back from a bridge and talking down a fire. The bridge has always been what is the point of this and the fire has always been an overwhelmingly destructive energy that threatens to consume everything. One is an anger turned inwards while the other is directed outwards, the building is burning and there is nothing to save in all of humanity.

One continuous showdown

The driver picks me up from Mumbai airport and drops me off in front of the hermitage entrance, at the foothills of an ancient fortress. Decades earlier, when the guru and his wife purchased the land, they kept panther-watch at night. I’m in the right place, aware of my own monster still prowling about

The other side

Metamorphosis is violent, and isn’t this radically beautiful to transform this body, to shape and alter it, to decay in order to live? To die in order to flourish? I can’t tell you how excited I am to expand. To walk in every direction of this life. Shoulders back and chest stretched wide in sunshine. No longer hunched and hiding. But full bodied and glorious. I hope I’ll be more sure, that I’ll speak more from the chest, that I’ll be more honest, when there’s less to hide behind. My future has never felt so bright.

Imperceptible signs

One day, I took a necklace with a hollow silver heart from my jewellery box. I gave it to my sister, telling her that this was a special necklace. Whenever she wore it, she would be protected from ghosts. She wouldn’t be able to see them anymore. She wore the necklace constantly and for the next week or so she slept peacefully through the night. But soon after the ghost returned. She would now appear in the hallway and this time she had a man with her. And so it continued.

Ourself behind ourself

There are moments in my life I look back upon in awe and disbelief. Other times, new consciousness allows me to view dimly lit tracts previously incomprehensible and menacing with luminous epiphany. It seems to me that in those moments another woman or girl was acting in my place, withholding my motivations, protecting me from being an accomplice. This shadow actor, the extent of whose influence I am never fully aware, sometimes passes through my peripheral vision, filling me with unease. What ambush might she stage if I do not keep watch? What confession might she murmur while I am asleep?