Edition 69
The European Exchange
- Published 4th August, 2020
- ISBN: 978-1-922212-50-4
- Extent: 304pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook
As Europe is thrown into sharp relief by a devastating pandemic, Griffith Review 69: The European Exchange explores the deep and complex relationships between Europe and Australia, and discusses how Australians of many backgrounds have contributed to a longstanding dialogue that enriches both continents.
Edited by Ashley Hay and Natasha Cica, The European Exchange features contributions from Christos Tsiolkas, Robyn Archer, George Megalogenis, Julienne van Loon, Christian Thompson, Arnold Zable, Gabriella Coslovich, Anthony Macris, and many more.
Griffith Review 69: The European Exchange is published with the support of the Australian National University.
AUDIO AND VIDEO
Listen to Ashley Hay reading her introduction ‘This south and that north’.
Listen to the webinar launch of Griffith Review 69: The European Exchange, hosted by the Australian National University.
Listen to Lee Kofman reading ‘At the Russian restaurant’.
Listen to Editor Ashley Hay in conversation with Pat Hoffie, Anthony Macris and Imogen Hayes. Produced in partnership with Griffith University Library.
Watch ‘Closed Borders, Open Minds?’ – a conversation between Natasha Cica, David Morris, Sally Wheeler and Christos Tsiolkas facilitated by Whitlam Institute Director Leanne Smith.
In this Edition
This south and that north
Click here to listen to Ashley Hay reading her introduction ‘This south and that north’. THERE IS A particular ebb and flow in crafting a co-edited collection, in the first vague collaborative maps of possible shapes, in the side-by-side work with individual writers, in the conversations sparked by...
Ripped in half?
ON THE HIGHWAY before the turnoff to the tranquil village where my small house sits in the heart of Europe – in Vojvodina, an hour from Belgrade; near the Romanian border; and on the edge of a nineteenth-century Austro-Hungarian estate, launched with a performance by...
Class, identity, justice
THE IMAGE IS strong and striking. It is of a young woman; her face unsmiling, her gaze proud and ever so lightly mocking – as if she knows that you are ascending the stairs to a contemporary art gallery and that you are both wishing...
The tyranny of closeness
I REMEMBER ENTERING Krakow for the first time, in 1995. I’d arrived at the train station via Paris, Berlin, Prague and Budapest – cities where I’d stayed for various periods, looking for a place to live and write. Back then, you couldn’t drop into a...
The art of the salon
WE TYPICALLY THINK of the grandest, most impressive parts of European culture in terms of physicality: castles, palaces, libraries, gardens, food, cafés, galleries, museums and monuments. These are the items we list on itineraries for a trip. However lovely these things are, they don’t fully...
A little moment
Come, my people, enter thou into thy chambers and shut thy doores about thee; hide thy selfe as it were for a little moment, until the indignation be overpast. Isaiah 26:20 (as translated in the King James Bible of 1611) MY GRANDFATHER WAS born in a...
From Bosnia to Australia
IT IS DISTURBING and painful to be told that the world that formed you, held you, has now ceased to exist – nonetheless, this experience is not unusual. You may have questioned this world, disapproved of it, held it in contempt – and it is better...
Lords of the ring
VIENNA’S RINGSTRASSE, BUILT from 1865 on the site of the old city wall, has long been derided for its architecture. Because it is a domain of revivalist styles, including neo-Renaissance, neo-Baroque and neo-Gothic, modernists have been contemptuous. But the Ringstrasse has recently been reappraised,...
Behind the scene
IN THE MIDDLE of the twentieth century, most Australian actors who wished to consider themselves ‘legitimate’ would still have considered the acquisition of a quasi-British accent an essential ingredient for success – here at home, and as part and parcel of the passport to a...
Stranger than the dreams of Ptolemy
Although Europeans had believed in the symmetry of the two hemispheres for nearly two centuries, they silently forgot the idea. They tolerantly accepted that when God created the world he had not wanted it to be symmetrical.Ernst van den Boogaart, ‘Mythical symmetry’ THE EXTENT TO...
Negotiating botanical collections
IT IS NOT widely known that many Australian colonial natural history collections are represented in German museums and herbaria, nor that there are initiatives to transform these artefacts of colonial heritage and science back into objects from living cultures with living custodians and their...
Atrocity, remembrance, spectacle
The process of experiencing the European city is one of corrosion, in which the screens of the city are torn away, revealing layers and nodes of history and memory that lie shattered by the trajectories of the twentieth century.Stephen Barber, Fragments of the European...
Asking the relevant questions
THE FIRST QUESTION. Why European thinking – again? My exchange with Europe goes back to the beginning: my father fled the country of his birth – the Netherlands – before the dust could settle after World War II. As a young boy, he was a direct witness to...
Climate of stagnation
AT COP25 IN Madrid – the twenty-fifth United Nations climate summit, held in December 2019 – I watched as the vice president of the European Commission, Frans Timmermans, elaborated on the important role of forests and biodiversity protection in the newly launched European Green Deal. The...
Brexit, Australian-style
IT WAS ALWAYS going to be ‘Australian-style’. When Boris Johnson unveiled his government’s new points-based immigration system in early February 2020, designed to ‘deliver Brexit’ by shifting Britain’s migrant intake ‘away from a reliance on cheap labour from Europe’, the spin cycle was at...
The kindness of strangers
FOR ALL HER long life, Baba Schwartz baked two yeast cakes every Friday: one laced with chocolate and nuts, the other with poppyseeds and apricot jam. She was a stellar baker. Home – in Hungary, rural Victoria or Melbourne – was the smell of her Sabbath...
Siege mentality
I FIRST CAME to Hungary thirty years ago as a young Australian diplomat, witnessing its democratic transition and conversion to a market economy after long decades in the Soviet bloc. Back in 1990 there was a tiny Australian Embassy – since closed as a cost-cutting...
Squats, squares and city plans
WALKING ALONG BERLIN’S River Spree one hot summer’s day in 2019, I happened upon a little garden. It was fenced, but a welcome sign sat at the open gate, along with an A4 flier advertising an upcoming workshop on Thymian & Fenchel – Eintritt frei. A large...
Come together
AS LIBRARY-BASED complexes have evolved in recent decades to foster important community making, interculturalism and egalitarian learning, Australia and Finland have led the way with twenty-first-century design. Despite their geographical separation, the two countries share similarities that have motivated their strategic use of libraries...
Wheat, wages and weapons
TWELVE KILOMETRES WEST of Melbourne’s central business district lies Sunshine, a growing urban centre that once housed Australia’s largest manufacturing industry. [i] Sunshine’s history holds tales of Australia’s transformation from a colony providing raw materials to the British Empire to an exporter of quality...
Memory and migration
AS PART OF its politics of memory, the European Union has expended considerable effort creating a transnational and unifying narrative of the past. By promoting a shared memory, it hopes to generate a sense of connectedness to ensure a peaceful future. Yet, in spite...
Out of time
MY DESIRE TO live in Rome germinated on a European holiday almost twenty years ago. I exited Trastevere train station, bleary eyed after the long-haul flight, and was instantly revived by the sight of women in tight skirts and stilettos zooming past on their Vespas....
Island stories
SANDY AND BERYL Stone had ‘a really lovely night’s entertainment’ one Tuesday in Melbourne in the late 1950s – according to Barry Humphries’s brilliant ‘Sandy Stone’ satire of Australian suburban life – when they attended a picture night at the tennis club. ‘The newsreel,’ Sandy reported,...
The breathing artist
I WORKED AS part of an ever-changing small team of lighthouse keepers in 1973, on three uninhabited islands off the West Coast of Scotland. I was twenty years old. I spent a lot of time sitting on rocks in the Atlantic. It was on those rocks –...
Strangers in a familiar land
THERE ARE THINGS you miss about Australia when you live in London, but you need never want for Australian company. There’s an Australian teacher at my kids’ school. I find Australians serving coffees, working at reception desks, handling public relations, running tech start-ups, churning out...
Red plague
You taught me language, and my profit on’tIs I know how to curse. The red plague rid youFor learning me your language! Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2 IRELAND IS A bookshelf in my mother’s place house. A book of Australian folk songs, from the...
Shadow life
I WAS LESS than five when I left Hungary for Australia, yet many of my formative experiences had already taken place – mostly unremembered and deep in the subconscious. Hungary was in my blood. In my Hungarian Jewish blood, I have to add. It is now...
Belonging
WE’RE ALL PART of a family, and often more than one. Even without kids, I turn up on several family trees, albeit as a cryptic and peripheral mention. But what bare bones family trees show: only dry lineage, not the hot pressure of relations. Those...
London calling
WHEN I TOOK my first job in advertising in 1994 – in my home town, Melbourne – the last thing I was looking for was a career. Like most graduates I was busy going out, drinking too much and fumbling my way through my first serious relationships....
Sous le soleil exactement
…AND WE FOUND ourselves in the old Anjou capital, Angers, in the Pays de la Loire, adrift in the wake of the Brexit referendum, midway through a French presidential election, turning left and right, hoping we wouldn’t be flattened crossing the road, sceptical of...
The signal line
GEO AND WES didn’t talk on the fifteen-minute drive from the airport, although that in itself wasn’t unusual. When they arrived at Royal Hobart, Geo hung back as Wes scanned the board for Psychological Medicine. It was Geo’s first time at the hospital since...
At the Russian restaurant
Listen to Lee Kofman reading ‘At the Russian restaurant’. AT MY REQUEST, Slavik is taking me to a Russian restaurant in the heart of Melbourne. This is him: narrow water-blue eyes; lips long and slippery like snakes; chopped hair with a balding patch at the back of his head;...
Refugium
THIS IS HOW it began for those in flight: with the scent of the sea, the sun playing on water, the light refracted by the Laguna. The invaders who pursued them took fright. The islets and marshes, and the swathes of wetlands repelled them....
Brisbane, late 1960s
YOUR MOTHER DOESN’T like the school holidays. She has to run the shop as well as keep an eye on you. Your brother and sister are older and seem to be able to take care of themselves. Your brother vanishes for hours on end...
Definition: wog (n); a thing
A wog is a word for a thing a polliwog, a golliwog a black-face doll – a sailor who has not crossed the equator – with a halo of hair and a gash of lips, no hips, frozen in time, a white minstrel thing, a caricature – a word from the past not used...
Creatures
Translated from the original Italian by Julia Anastasia Pelosi-Thorpe I Nothing flimsier, nothing easier: time is lost if I believe we’ll have time to count all happiness’s forms. I follow the ocean picture on the screen: it separates us it’s cold, at every pivot of birds your body and mine can...
Aplonis fusca
sing me champagne from the windows sing me a child out of doors sing me pollen on kitchen chairs and straws that weave mats with wind sing me champagne, or port or even beer sing me a child sing me Author’s note: This poem is part of a series on every recently...
Unicornered
Our dinosaur balloon has lost its pep. For weeks it commandeered the living room. It swayed above its empire like an airship puffing out its hull of aluminium taut as a kettledrum. Its bouncy arm insisted that we recognise its thaneship and grant its natural right to lebensraum. The old gods...
Mother-daughter trip
Nana B and Zeide once ice-skated on a lake in the Carpathian Mountains in Poland. ‘I was made for Poland,’ says Mum, as Brisbane roils with heat. But we are not headed for my great-grandparents’ homeland; we are journeying to Geelong. ‘Mother-daughter trips are good for the soul,’ says my shrink....
Equinox
Christian Thompson’s digital photographic prints could be stills from a morality play in which he performs the sole protagonist. Composed as overtly poetic allegories with quixotic themes from the comedic to the mock tragic, they are thick with suggestion and references and ever open...
In the garden of ideas
Emily Floyd, Owl of Minerva (2019) Owl: cast aluminium, two-part epoxy paint; lantern: cast and fabricated aluminium, lighting insert 150 x 130.65 x 99.7 cm Photo: Jacqui Shelton Emily Floyd, Umlauts (2019) Set of three sculptures: (a) 81 x 55.9 x 20 cm; (b) 61 x 43 x 15...
Featured Contributors
Christos Tsiolkas
Christos Tsiolkas is the author of six novels. His fourth, the international bestseller The Slap (Allen & Unwin, 2008), won...
George Megalogenis
George Megalogenis is an author, commentator and journalist with three decades of experience in the media. His most recent...
Lee Kofman
Lee Kofman is the author of three works of fiction and the two memoirs Imperfect (Affirm Press, 2019), which...
Julienne van Loon
Julienne van Loon is an associate professor in creative writing at RMIT University. Her books include Road Story (Allen...
