Fact or Non-Fiction?

The writers response to history.

A talk given at the Sydney institute and published in the Sydney Papers summer 1996.

Tonight I want to talk about the choices writers make when their subject matter is, if you like, common property – when much or all of their background material consists of facts in the public arena … read more

Not Dead Yet

Feminism, Passion and Women’s Liberation

What was it like to participate in the Women’s Liberation Movement? What made millions of women step forward from the 1960s onwards and join it in different ways? Many of the 56 women in this book were there. They describe how they have contributed in multitudinous ways across politics, the arts, health, education, environmentalism, economics and science and created wonderfully rebellious activism. And how they continue this activism today with determined grittiness. Here are women – all over 70 years of age – still railing against the patriarchal systemic oppression of women, still fighting back … read more

The European Exchange

Griffith review 69

IF EUROPE IS A PROJECT, as the French president Emmanuel Macron suggested in early 2019, it’s one that combines continuing internal reinvention with innovations and approaches from far beyond its shores.

This edition of Griffith Review brings together Australian and European perspectives to explore the ongoing cycle of transformation and exchange. It places contemporary Australian writers who have strong European connections in conversation with important European voices, tracing the links and legacies that underpin the myriad influences these two parts of the world have upon each other. It examines the continuing transformation of Australia’s cultures, habits, values and traditions sparked by waves of European immigrants and influence, and how European experiences of living in Australia, and watching it change, have in turn catalysed change in Europe… read more

Opting Out

Edition 17: Staying Alive

FOR MANY AUSTRALIANS, suicide is still a secret, shameful business. Like incest and child abuse, it doesn’t happen to us. The secrecy lies, I think, in its universal and seductive power. It can tempt anyone at any time, as the logical answer to unbearable difficulty. For most of us, the pull of life outweighs it in an instant or an hour, but for a few of us the call becomes imperative. Those few, driven to commit the final, irrevocable act, those few who could have been you or me, are difficult to talk about. Outside the language of reports and statistics, suicide remains lace-curtain hush-hush territory … read more

The Gift of Tongues

Edition 6: Our Global Face

LANGUAGE AND PLACE no longer define us as simply as they once did. We can slip and slide between languages and places in ways difficult for our parents, impossible for our grandparents. Language, culture, family, place. Out of that mix emerges the individual personality. And, increasingly, in a world that is shrinking, in which people move ever more easily and in ever greater numbers, the interplay between the language(s) we speak and place(s) we find ourselves, is a subject of complexity and contemplation, a minefield, a creative conundrum … read more

Dark Times

Edition 24: Participation Society

ONE OF THE pluses of living through dark times is that people get angry; they are stirred to put pen to paper, begin email campaigns, to get out on the streets. They write books. They try to make change. Thankfully we live in a country in which those forms of protest are possible and the punishments and sanctions for citizens who rebel are relatively subtle… read more

The Silence

Edition 32: Wicked Problems, Exquisite Dilemmas

MANY AUSTRALIAN JEWS take an intense interest in Israel. They find it difficult to ignore the miracle of its creation so soon after the Holocaust, but also impossible to ignore the underside of that miracle: the tragic dispossession of the Palestinian people. They find themselves on the horns of a dilemma made all the more wicked by the gag so many Australian Jews impose on themselves, even when they disagree with the Israeli state’s actions and policies

… read more