Self-portrait in Joy Hester pocket mirror

About the author

Melinda Bufton

Melinda Bufton is the author of Moxie (2020), winner of the Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award 2019.

More from this edition

FictionI touch the wax of their pickaxes, then run my hand along the wax rock of the walls. One man squats a few metres away from the others, holding a pan. As I move towards him, I notice a label with descriptive text about Victoria’s gold rush, a reminder of the foundational gruesomeness of the enterprise – the colonial history of world’s fairs, or zoos, here insisting on itself in a minor carnival of the macabre.

Will we dance when it’s over?

Non-fiction These men are simply lost to the storm, no longer spoken about. But why does the response to the loss of human life, and a reckoning with their intentions, feel just as detached as the reaction to the disappearance of a cartoonish avatar? The stakes in our real world have reached a point so high, so close to apocalypse, that they’ve disappeared entirely. We are gripped by a nihilism and unnerving sense of unreality, and so we don’t receive the messages others are trying to send to us.

The money shot

Non-fictionPornography challenges our very constructions of what is ‘real’. It complicates questions about how we understand ‘real’ consent, for example. There may not be anyone forcing young people to follow the pornographic script. But with so much influence on young people’s sexual imaginations, pornography is setting the cultural context within which they do sex and gender.