Edition 2
Dreams of Land
- Published 2nd December, 2003
- ISBN: 9780733313509
- Extent: 236 pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm)
The outstanding writers in Griffith REVIEW explore the new challenges of the great Australian land dreams with freshness and insight.
Writers include: Melissa Lucashenko, Jim Forbes with Peter Spearritt, Matthew Condon, Brendan Gleeson, Mark Wakely, Jack Waterford, Michael Wilding, Ian Lowe, Andrew Belk, Noel Pearson, Tom Connors, Mark McKenna, Geraldine Brooks, Ramona Koval and many more.
In this Edition
The casuarina forest
The she-oak (casuarina) is a melancholy kind of tree, with feathery leaves that hang in fringes from short stems... [it] whispers and murmurs in the wind, making noises that early settlers compared to a harp. AT THE VERY northern tip of the 36-kilometre strip of beach...
Building relationships to care for country
MAURICE BINSTEAD WOULD start to whistle every time we came into the Arcadia Valley in central Queensland. Roddy Smith is filled with peace at Lake Victoria, near Mildura. Lyndon Schneiders is awestruck and protective of the unique landscapes of Cape York.Together with many other...
Rum Corps to white-shoe brigade
AUSTRALIA HAS MORE land per capita than any other continent.[i] When the great European powers set out to conquer the Americas, Africa and the Great South Land they encountered both closely settled and sparsely spread communities. Even if Australia's Aboriginal population was more than 1...
Turning the tide of history
Our relationship to the ground is, culturally speaking, paradoxical: for we appreciate it only in so far as it bows down to our will. Let the ground rise up to resist us, let it prove porous, spongy, rough, irregular – let it assert its native title,...
What’s driving suburban Australia? Fear in the tank, hope on the horizon
MIKE MOORE'S RECENT Oscar-winning documentary, Bowling for Columbine, depicted an America in the thrall of fear, largely of itself. Ostensibly about the ravages of United States gun culture, Columbineexposed far deeper tensions within America's white suburban societies. A sequence of animated maps retold the story of...
Not quite white in the head
EARTHSPEAKING? YOU WILL think of it as a big story, a national story. Native Title. Salinity. Landcare. Turn the rivers backwards or find that inland sea. It's Burke and Wills, it's the Bushtucker Man, it's drought and flooding rains, but no. Stop. Pause for...
Poetics of place
No society can make a perpetual constitution or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation.– Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, September 6, 1789 AUSTRALIANS LIVE UNDER a constitution that speaks only to the dead. Since its inception in 1901, the federal...
Home in the imagination
WE LIVE OUT our lives, most of us, in other people's houses. We had no say in their shapes, took no part in their construction. Perhaps the house in which you live was standing before you were. Most likely it will outlive you. People...
View from Munibung Hill
COME SIT UPON Munibung Hill with me. When I was a kid we called it Hawkins Hill after the family who owned it. The Hawkins made their fortune carting shit and the tale of how the local shit carters made it big was a...
Pythagoras and the turtle
THEY DON'T HAVE siestas in the Galiwin'ku community on Elcho Island, in Arnhem Land on the Arafura Sea, but no one feels like doing much after lunch. I sit on the back veranda in the tropical heat as the afternoon downpour begins, the sounds...
Growing things
AS SOON AS I achieved my escape from the groves of academia nuts, I moved to the land of macadamia nuts. The dream of every Anglophone man of letters is to become a man of the land. Shades of Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell, Allen...
The painted desert
FITZROY CROSSING, IN north-western Australia, is a group of settlements set between abrupt scarps of sandstone. The weather oscillates between the furnace heat of the dry season and the lashing rains of the wet, when saturated rocks glow red against lush grasses and wide...
The best paddock
A DECADE AGO, Debbie Thiele remembers putting the phone down, heart thumping, head buzzing with the news that she had been selected as a finalist in ABC Radio's inaugural Rural Woman of the Year award.Through the kitchen window she could see the rolling dust...
Rebuilding Canberra’s spirit
OUR FIRES START in the ranges to the south and west of Canberra. It's fairly open flat country, farm and forest land to the immediate south-west, but beyond the Murrumbidgee, one is in the ragged Brindabella ranges. As hot air from the plains runs...
Featured Contributors
Geraldine Brooks
Geraldine Brooks is the bestselling author of six works of fiction and three volumes of non-fiction. Her novel March...
Melissa Lucashenko
Melissa Lucashenko is an award-winning Goorie author of Bundjalung and European heritage. Her first novel, Steam Pigs, was published...
Mark McKenna
Associate Professor Mark McKenna's research interests include Australian history, particularly political and cultural history and Aboriginal history. Over the...
Noel Pearson
Noel Pearson is an Indigenous Australian lawyer, land rights activist and Director of the Cape York Institute for Policy...
