Featured in
- Published 20230502
- ISBN: 978-1-922212-83-2
- Extent: 264pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook
Already a subscriber? Sign in here
If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au
Share article
About the author
Vidyan Ravinthiran
Vidyan Ravinthiran is an associate professor of English literature at Harvard University. He’s the author of two books of verse: Grun-tu-molani (2014), which was...
More from this edition
Filling the void
Non-fictionThese failures of clean-up, or ‘mining legacies’, are the result of booms and busts – of minerals drifting in and out of favour. Nothing is as precious as a hole in the ground – until that hole in the ground is worth less than nothing. When a boom ends and a resource’s price plummets, a quarry’s metamorphosis from asset to liability can take place in an instant. When abandoned mines are located in out-of-the-way places, populated by those with little political influence, tailings may simply be left to blow in the wind.
See through a glass darkly
Non-fictionOn the way home that night we pass Oxford Street. It’s lit up and people are dancing in the windows of the clubs. There’s a rainbow flag on one of the buildings. Dad turns to look at this with a grimace: he shakes his head and sucks his teeth. He turns the volume up on the CD player and focuses on the road ahead.
Into the swamp
Non-fictionSome versions of environmentalism understandably encourage an almost Swiftian misanthropy, with the ecological collapse framed as the inevitable response of nature to a pestiferous humanity, the only species that, by its very existence, destroys all that it touches. But maybe, just maybe, it doesn’t have to be that way.