Edition 71
Remaking the Balance
- Published 2nd February, 2021
- ISBN: 978-1-922212-56-6
- Extent: 264pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook
As the world teeters between old and new ways of doing, can we remake the balance between what we need and what we nurture? Can we forge a new equilibrium to sustain us into the twenty-first century?
Having challenged so much – social practices and social structures, habits of mind and habits of leisure – will the pandemic leave a lasting legacy on how we shape the world? Griffith Review 71: Remaking the Balance examines how our natural, economic and cultural systems might be refashioned post-pandemic: will it be a return to business as usual, or can we reinvent our relationship with all that is animal, vegetable and mineral to create a more sustainable future?
Edited by Ashley Hay, Remaking the Balance looks at how we can do more with what we have, and features leading writers and thinkers, including Gabrielle Chan, Clare Wright, Matthew Evans, Sophie Cunningham, Inga Simpson, John Kinsella, Declan Fry, plus an exclusive Q&A with Barbara Kingsolver.
AUDIO
Listen to Editor Ashley Hay read her introduction ‘Create, destroy, reset’.
Listen to Nardi Simpson read ‘Gifts across space and time’.
Listen to journalist Nance Haxton‘s ‘Returning fire to Australia’s landscapes’, and read the transcript here.
Listen to Inga Simpson read ‘Blue crane’.
Listen to Tony Wood, Grattan Institute, discuss ‘Accord and antagonisms’.
In this Edition
Breaking new ground
IT WAS NEVER part of my plan to move to a farm. The landscape is Wiradjuri country, bought from previous farmers in the 1920s by my husband’s family. In the past quarter-century since I moved from the city, I have become more familiar with this place...
Masters of the future or heirs of the past?
IN MAY 2020, the international mining giant Rio Tinto made a calculated and informed decision to drill 382 blast holes in an area of its Brockman 4 mining lease that encompassed the ancient rock shelter formations at Juukan Gorge in Western Australia’s Pilbara region....
Generation Covid
APRIL IS MY favourite time of year in Melbourne. The weather is comparatively stable and the days warm, richly complementing the autumn colours. In 2020 there was even more time to enjoy them than usual, and the late summer rains seemed to have deepened...
It’s more than just the fruit
MANGOES ARE DEEPLY embedded in my childhood. Even now the smell or taste of the fruit connects me instantly to hot summers in Brisbane. I can see myself as a seven-year-old sitting under the sprinkler with mango juice running through my fingers, fighting my siblings...
Food insecurity in uncertain times
Wistfully she muses on / Something bartered, something gone / Songs of old remembered days / The walkabout, the old free ways / Blessed with everything she prized / Trained and safe and civilized / Much she has that they have not / But...
Sitting with difficult things
AS A CHILD in the early 1970s I would sometimes overhear my parents discussing how much commercial television I should be allowed to watch. The shows in question included Get Smart, I Dream of Jeannie, Lost in Space and The Brady Bunch. Even though I was only eight...
Accords and antagonisms
Listen to Tony Wood, Grattan Institute, discuss ‘Accord and antagonisms’. THE PHYSICAL AND scientific evidence of human-induced climate change continues its depressing march towards greater evidential reality. Yet emissions continue to grow and policies around the world remain short of what is needed to address the problem....
A long half-life
ON MY DESK there sits a well-thumbed copy of the 1976 Fox Report, the first report of the Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry. I grew up in New South Wales, where most electricity came from coal-fired power stations, but miners were often killed or injured and...
Trash fish, sand, sea snails
WHY ARE SOME resources sexy and others not? The monumental equipment that accompanies certain forms of major resource extraction helps in the sexiness stakes. In Pilbara mines, trucks weighing nearly 400 tonnes stand more than seven-metres tall, dwarfing the remaining humans that drive them....
Touching the future
As defined by Norbert Wiener, an American mathematician, cybernetics was ‘the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine’, and also in society and in the individual. In particular, for Wiener and others, it was about the study of feedback mechanisms and circular causal systems, including in the newly proliferating space of computers.
State actions and libertarian lawsuits
IN SEPTEMBER 2020, for the first time in its seventy-five-year history, the annual meeting of the UN General Assembly was held virtually. In Le Corbusier’s vast General Assembly Hall, UN officials and a single masked representative of each member state sat in a socially...
Postnatural, post-wild, posthuman
RACHAEL: Do you like our owl? DECKARD: It’s artificial? RACHAEL: Of course it is. DECKARD: Must be expensive. RACHAEL: Very. Blade Runner (1982) THE COURSE OF human history has sometimes been shifted on its axis by a single image. Phan Thi Kim Phúc fleeing naked from a napalm attack in...
Gifts across space and time
A speak/listen trade will always include things that have never been thought or said before as well as the word gifts I wish to give. When things like this appear in a trade, don’t worry – it doesn’t mean I am making things up or holding information back. I’m not ripping you off! It is a sign there is respect in the speak/listen relationship. It is proof the relationship is alive, growing, and we are learning together. This happens a lot when people meet to talk about culture and cultural things.
Returning value to profit
AS THE CONSCIENTIOUS middle child of Holocaust survivors, my objectives as a young man were narrow and conventional: to become a better person, build a strong and loving family, achieve financial security and find happiness. I worked hard, was lucky in love and health,...
Verdigris
COPPER IS AMONG the earliest of metals to be used by humans, and has been smelted, cast and moulded for over ten thousand years. It is also one of the first to be purposefully alloyed with another, so that copper and tin become bronze,...
The professor and the word
Every thinker thinks one thought. The researcher needs constantly new discoveries and inspirations, else science will bog down and fall into error. The thinker needs one thought only. Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? I REMEMBER READING it by torchlight, or perhaps candlelight, which can’t be true....
Eating for the climate
IF THERE’S ONE area in which the battle for the food dollar has met the battle for the climate head on, it’s meat. In particular, meat from grazing animals. Those who believe we should all abstain from eating meat have found the ultimate enemy...
Tales from the frontline
Melbourne: 31 August 2020 Covid cases: Australia 25,746; [i] World 25,162,019[ii] Atmospheric carbon dioxide: 414.48 ppm[iii] LIKE PRETTY MUCH everyone lucky enough to be working as the pandemic rages, we’re doing so from home. Him downstairs, me upstairs, yoked to our devices and summoning up spectral colleagues...
Hail hydrogen
I’M SITTING IN the passenger seat of a Hyundai Nexo on a tree-studded Canberra street. It’s stopped to reverse into a parking spot, but no one is driving – an ultra-luxury ghost car. Scott Nargar, Hyundai’s ‘senior manager of future mobility’, stands in the middle of...
‘A poem is a unicycle’
IN LATE 2020, Barbara Kingsolver published How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons), her first poetry collection in almost twenty years. Many of these poems operate as spare and elegant suggestions for navigating the various ruptures, changes, remakings and accommodations of a life....
Animal perspective
ERIN HORTLE: In Tasmania, there is a place where female octopuses emerge from the water and make their way across an isthmus, with a highway running across it, in search of habitat to extrude their eggs. Luckily, on the other side of this isthmus,...
Blue crane
Listen to Inga Simpson read ‘Blue crane’. THOSE FIRST WEEKS Sally walked the beach, it went unread. She saw only a scallop of yellow sand edged with dark rock. Although her eyes were directed downwards, ahead of her feet and, occasionally, out to the horizon, her gaze was...
Provenance
THEY WENT TO a broker. Working their way through the maze of the air market felt beyond them, if they wanted to get the best possible price. Brokers knew buyers – collectors and connoisseurs, dabblers and dilettantes. They took a percentage cut. The broker’s...
Three poems
How to have a child Begin on the day you decide you are fit to carry on. Begin with a quailing heart for here you stand on the fault line. Begin if you can at the beginning. Begin with your mother, with her grandfather, the ones before him. Think of their hands, all of them: firm...
urgent biophilia
wrist-deep in dirt for something less particular satisfaction more tasty than butter lettuce wilting kale curling towards sun cabbage grubs chew chew chewing cabbage butterflies pupating try a decoy moth mobile the bean vine sprints 10cm a day are carrots after carrots okay? a tender snap and crunch in sunset hues greens too fast for...
The Biyula novels
We pause in front of a fallen eucalypt blackened trunk glistening with charcoal grids decode species-information: the time of its seeding and the intensity of the fire which consumed it.
Qualifying ode to experience
‘The world is all that is the case.’ Wittgenstein but not a newsfeed, not really... A person isn’t a noun or an abstract noun. When the termites swarm over dry tracts after sudden wet, after deluge, after the rise of moisture mocks the dryness and threatens caltrop as the only viable...
Featured Contributors
Declan Fry
Declan Fry is a writer, poet, critic and essayist. Born on Wongatha country in Kalgoorlie, he has written for...
Inga Simpson
Inga Simpson is the author of Understory: A Life With Trees (Hachette, 2017), Where the Trees Were (Hachette, 2016), Nest (Hachette, 2014) and Mr...
Matthew Evans
Matthew Evans is a chef, farmer and writer who runs a mixed smallholding, Fat Pig Farm, in southern Tasmania,...
Sophie Cunningham
Sophie Cunningham is the author of six books including City of Trees: Essays on Life, Death and the Need...
