Essays

From Vietnam to Gaza, Eda Gunaydin considers the recent and historical convergences of mass politics and anti-war sentiment, examining the role of artists at moments of political mobilisation as well as their vulnerability to state surveillance.

Reading across several decades of Frank Moorhouse’s essays on the writing life, author Gina Ward maps Moorhouse’s changing sense of vocation, and the ruinous effects of rising economic precarity on the writers of his generation.

Introducing the Frank Moorhouse Reading Room project, author and critic Tegan Bennett Daylight reflects on the generational shifts that have shaped Australian writing as well as the creative and industrial legacies of Frank Moorhouse.

In this labile essay, Gareth Morgan plumbs the depths of the pool as a site of ritual, recreation, and the poet’s labour. From Mohenjo-daro to Carlton, Morgan recovers from the concrete history of public bathing a poetics of the ‘locus amoenus’.

What if we approached video games as we do poems? In this essay, Vidyan Ravinthiran proposes a new way of writing about gaming: a poetics that gives as much credence to the rhythms and repetition of fingerwork as to the patterns of storytelling.

Josefina Huq records the sibling intimacies fostered by the world-building of the Kirby video game franchise. Charting the vicissitudes of growing up and apart, the games serve as a reminder of all that she and her brother refuse to leave behind.

In this essay, Anwen Crawford reflects on being a latecomer to the sport that united her family: cricket. From scorebooks and dictionaries to journalism to on-field protest messages, Crawford tallies the many forms that cricket writing can take.

Read an edited extract from Abbas El-Zein’s memoir Bullet, Paper, Rock: A Memoir of Words and Wars out now. Published with permission from the author and Upswell Publishing.

In her final essay, literary scholar Sneja Gunew (1946–2024) explores the affective dimensions of migrant writers’ transit between languages, capping a lifetime’s advocacy for those whose participation in the national culture ‘is grounded in their differences’. We present a lightly edited version of this essay with reflections on Gunew’s life and work by Ivor Indyk and Eda Gunaydin.

Reading Palestine through South American literary and political history, Yumna Kassab reflects on the potency of symbols during times of repression.