culture

Gregory Day The power of simile and metaphor often hits its peak in the poetic line. When describing something as apparently commonplace as soil, a writer might be forgiven for unleashing all their rhetorical strategies to enliven the topic. But as Alisa Bryce...

Conrad Landin “The way of the train is also the way of the boarding school, the convent, the prison and the psychiatric hospital,” Jenny Diski wrote in her 2002 travel memoir Stranger on a Train , in which she interweaves the story of a trip around the United...

Nathan Smith Almost one in five Australian women – and one in 20 Australian men – will experience sexual violence after the age of 15. These bleak statistics open Katrina Marson’s Legitimate Sexpectations , a measured yet impassioned call for comprehensive...

Isabella Trimboli Early in Mothercare , a hospital room offers a good analogy for the incompetence of the American healthcare system. Lynne Tillman’s mother has had a seizure and is rushed to hospital in an ambulance. Once she gets there, she’s barely lucid,...

Jeff Sparrow In 1984, the historian Geoffrey Blainey sparked a nationwide debate by denouncing the government for its supposed preference towards Asian migrants. The subsequent normalisation of the far right means Blainey’s comments no longer shock as they once...

Brooke Boland Award-winning novelist and essayist Gregory Day has written widely on subjects as varied as the powerful owl and Australian poetry. Many of his nonfiction essays have appeared in notable literary publications over the years, each demonstrating Day’s...

Leah Jing McIntosh The peculiar thing about grief is that the world continues. Or, as Amanda Svensson writes, “Nothing ever ends, but everything ends.” Svensson’s newest novel, A System So Magnificent It Is Blinding , considers how different textures of loss are...

John Kinsella In his 14th collection, Harvest Lingo , Murri poet Lionel Fogarty continues his decades-long commitment to disrupting colonial language, colonial thought and their machineries of oppression. Fogarty creates poems in which language is liberated,...

Annie Smithers The origins of particular foods, drinks and specific dishes are a fascination for many. Everyday items such as cornflakes and Nutella have origin stories. Many of these origins come from failures, mistakes or simple serendipitous events. Oscar...