Reframing the thought ­
experiment

Click here to listen to Editor Ashley Hay read her introduction ‘Reframing the thought experiment’. IT WAS ONLY recently that I learnt about aphantasia, a condition in which people cannot conjure up or visualise mental imagery. A friend explained that if she asked her children to imagine seeing...

Facing foundational wrongs

ROMAN QUAEDVLIEG STANDING tall in his smart black suit – medals glistening, insignia flashing – looked every bit the man-in-uniform from central casting when he stood between Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Immigration Minister Peter Dutton on 1 July 2015 to launch a new paramilitary unit...

New world dreams

EREWHON. SOUNDS WELSH – the soft ‘h’. That’s what I thought when I first saw the word on the higgledy-piggledy front fence of a bach in the South Island of New Zealand. But the word isn’t from Wales. It isn’t from any particular place....

Creation stories

Listen to Editor Ashley Hay in conversation with Sarah Sentilles for Byron Writers Festival. The word utopia makes me nervous, an uneasiness cultivated by too many years in divinity school listening to people talk about the afterlife. Paradise, heaven, the kingdom of God – for some Christians, the promise of another...

Erasure

...is the economics profession a functionary and tool of patriarchy – or is patriarchy a functionary and tool of economics? Marilyn Waring   THE DAY I was completing this essay, I joined tens of thousands across Australia to March 4 Justice against sexual assault and gendered violence in the...

Blue wedge

A STRANGE DISQUIET stalks the Australian arts and cultural community. It’s not just the very real effects of COVID-19 – it’s a deeper anxiety, a sense that something is happening here, but we don’t know what it is. That the Coalition government’s response to the impact...

Orphaned responsibility

UTOPIAN IDEALS ARE ordinarily more ambitious, and romantic, than the desire to see a constitutional system functioning as it should. The latter sounds more like a defence of the status quo than a reimagining of political possibility. Anyone who lived through 2020 in Australia, however,...

Restoring wholeness

AS A POLITICAL (and social) theorist, my thinking has always been anchored in a passionate attachment to the Australian people – the polity. My thinking has been guided by contemporary questions of how to think about our polity and the challenges that face it.  I...

Grounded imaginaries

THIS WE KNOW: we live within systems, institutions and structures – economic, social, political, cultural and discursive – that are generating disastrous outcomes for all life, including human life.[i] A simple narrative might identify the extraction and burning of fossil fuels as the culprits in causing catastrophic...

Power to the people

IN AUSTRALIA, A purportedly equitable and participatory democracy, it is popular to believe that we all have the freedoms and rights to engage in the discussions that create our society. We all get to vote – if we are the right age. We can all...

The greatest shows on Earth

AMONG THE MEMENTOS (boardgames, guidebooks, banners, souvenir plates) on display at the permanent World’s Fair exhibition at the Queens Museum in New York, there’s a small blue and white badge that reads, ‘I have seen the future.’ The pin was doled out to the five million...

Revisiting Andrew Inglis Clark

IN 2013 GRIFFITH Review published an issue focused on Tasmania, which I co-edited with founding editor Julianne Schultz. We sensed that a big wave of attention was about to break in relation to Australia’s smallest and most southerly state. My own curiosity around this was...

Above the line

THE INTERNATIONAL FOCUS on eliminating extreme poverty globally has grown since the late twentieth century, even among those who don’t view its elimination as utopian but simply as plausible. The most internationally recognised of these attempts came through the Millennium Development Goals, which were...

Life on JobKeeper

IN SEPTEMBER 2020, two months into Melbourne’s second lockdown, I was in my local park doing my allotted hour of physical activity when a pleasant feeling that wasn’t just feel-good-exercise-chemicals flowed through me. A surprising thought followed: ‘I’m really happy.’ I’d just had another weekday of the...

Home, together, a family

APPARENTLY, THE STEROIDS saved Charlotte’s life. Taking Charlotte out so early definitely saved Elizabeth’s life. The placenta was killing both of them: starving Charlotte and sending her mother’s organs into failure. A 5 am call back to the hospital shattered my deluded hope that the...

Astronomy as poetry

I BELIEVED IN it. I more than believed in it – I was obsessed. It was a vision of something amazing, something I thought could never happen on Earth. A vision of co-operation among all the beings on a planet to overcome adversity – to survive as a...

Aftermath

IN THE AFTERMATH of 2020 – a year that outstripped description, so broad and deeply felt were its tragedies and crises – I stood on the foreshore of Pambula Lake looking out across the water at wavering gumtrees. Rows of molluscs crosshatched the shining water, their...

Scaling change

Listen to Amanda Tattersall read ‘Scaling change’ I’M OLD ENOUGH to remember when Australia’s Wonderland opened in 1985 in Sydney’s western suburbs. I was eight. Arriving was like leaping into an assortment of highly curated alternative worlds. Wonderland was a better place. The park unabashedly said so in...

My Covid dreaming

HE WORE OFF-WHITE trainers with built-up soles. The caved-in line of his jaw told me he had no teeth of his own. The other one, with honey-brown skin, held numerous bags and an ancient boom box. They met outside the bunker-like train station, arms...

Worlds of play

IMAGINE A PARK made out of candy, with bridges featuring water cannons that shoot water onto kayakers below. Imagine huge climbing walls from which you can jump onto giant trampolines, or a place that allows you to skydive into your neighbourhood park. Imagine a...

Manufacturing a co‑operative future

DRIVING INTO MORWELL, on the long highway from Melbourne, the first things you see are the smokestacks of the Yallourn Power Station. On a grey overcast morning the thick smoke coming out mingles in the air with the clouds and is almost indistinguishable. This...

No limits

…transgender – is a futurity of the here and of the now, a virtuality that does not belong to the past nor does it lend itself to projections of the future, but it is totally immersed in the very now of the present. Caterina Nirta   My vision...

The hopeful edges of power

‘UTOPIAN’ AND ‘RADICAL’ are unlikely words to spring to mind in ­everyday debates about law and governance – but what if the connections they can make are common? In that case, the idea of ‘utopian legalities’ might convey a shared understanding that law and legal...

The open-plan office

DR X TREMBLED with excitement. The hall was quiet, deserted, but behind every closed door she knew that there were scientists doing experiments and developing theories, advancing knowledge. She hoped they liked her. She wanted to help them change the world. ‘And here,’ said Professor...

A short history of guns in America

The first firearm was the Chinese fire lance, a gunpowder-filled bamboo tube first depicted on a tenth-century silk banner from the Gansu Province in Western China. Early incarnations of the fire lance were used mainly for shock value in melees – the weapon little more than a glorified firework attached to a spear.

The day after the storm

AT FIRST, THE black clouds gathered as if in contemplation. Like a herd of dark thoughts, they quickly gave way to action. The storm, when it followed, was unlike any that had ever been seen before. The clouds lapped around the skies like tortured...

The memory clinic

THE PROCEDURE WOULD be painless, the white-smocked facilitator assured her. Lee sat almost catatonic as the translucent wires were removed from her forehead, moving only to smooth the white fabric of her skirt over her knees. She kept her eyes in soft focus, and...

The future

For a moment he was given his future: a prophetic pulse racing to the horizon of his life and washing it stark and certain, the glacier of days crisp with everything he would ever achieve, the pitiful lies he would tell his wife, his son’s estrangement, the shape of his...

2029 Headlines

New Victorian State Bird Symbol Announced Venice Hotel Owners Sell Up National Cancer Detection Implant Program Rolls Out The Anti-Robot Movement Gains Celebrity Support 60% of Australian Families Prefer Virtual Schools Boost in Child Mental Health Funding Push for Phase Out of Non-Electric Vehicles Cooling Bands Mandatory for 48+ Degree Days Preparations...

Hummingbirds in the forest of needle and blood

Say there is a boy in a village. Say the boy is not always a boy, but today he is. Say he is wandering by cactus, not wanting to be stuck by thorns, but wanting to smell the flowers and gather the fruits, not...

Dystopian photo album

Buried in slough of immaculate lust We wave off the iron-man model Coughing up money and fake lottery tix Ipso facto zippers and guylines, Flysheets and groundsheets, door folds And support poles, mosquito netting to keep Blood supplies intact, and appease the vista. Our business is to stroke your finest feeling...

Opposite day

Today is opposite day yesterday was Thursday, an ordinary day but today – is different the poor are rich the rich fight over a pot of boiled rice by the bank of the poisoned Lake Victoria, Tanzania the sky is ocean the ocean is desert the forest is a carpark carparks are...

Lost utopias

Exploding time past and time present

THE VERY IDEA of stepping back in time as a Badtjala woman is a utopian thought. Back in time the Badtjala people traversed to and from the mainland and the islands in the Great Sandy Strait with ease. What if I could be transplanted...