Non-fictionIMAGINE YOURSELF A bird, huge, flying out of time through a smoky sky, back, back through millennia. Further than your own memory, deeper than your instinct: about 226 million years. Gondwana floats, massive, around the polar south. Umbilical. The...

ReportageDEBBIE KILROY WAS sitting quietly at home in Brisbane on the afternoon of 6 January 2019, scrolling through social media posts on her phone. That was unusual enough: the criminal lawyer and fierce advocate for women rarely sits, unless...

FictionFor the second instalment of our summer of Sunday-reading, Griffith Review celebrates Kristina Olsson's 'Shell', an excerpt from her 2018 novel by the same name, and published in Griffith Review 58: Storied Lives – The Novella Project V as...

Essay…for to know a place in any real and lasting way is sooner or later to dream it. That's how we come to belong to it in the deepest sense. – William Least Heat-Moon I WAS BORN to two mothers, one...

ReportageIT IS 1953. In Paris, Simone de Beauvoir launches the term 'women's liberation' in her groundbreaking The Second Sex, the UN adopts the Convention on the Political Rights of Women in New York, and Margaret Mittelheuser quietly refuses to...

MemoirWHEN MY SON was young - six perhaps, or seven – my mother made him a promise. We were stacking books and cleaning shelves on a soupy summer's day, the three of us preoccupied until then with dust and...

MemoirSEVERAL YEARS AFTER she lost her first child, Peter – abducted by his father in early 1950, lost without trace – my mother met the man she would spend the rest of her life with, the man who would...