‘I’ve never been too impressed with the metaphoric mountain-top that Black race scholars and civil rights activists have typically been concerned with, of a promised land and a dream … As appealing as it sounds I don’t believe that such a world will ever be possible in a settler colonial state … The place that they have built for themselves was established and is sustained by racial violence, and all of their institutions are unrelenting in their viciousness towards sovereign Black bodies.’

In September Meanjin, Queensland academic, Munanjahli and South Sea Islander woman Chelsea Watego writes powerfully on the necessity of ‘walking away’ from colonial institutions and constructs, in order to find the truth of individual and collective power as an Indigenous Australian. It is, she argues, a fight against the very notion of race itself- ‘We must stand in our own power, for it is only in knowing ours that we know the false claims of theirs. This is black power.’

Patrick Allington writes on how Swedish artist Hilma af Klint ‘has intruded upon my inner world and become a sort of guiding light’. Amal Awad surveys the world of romance novels for signs of orientalism and ‘sheikh-lit’. Tom Griffiths paints a lingering portrait of the ‘humble Australian bushman’, John Blay, writer, walker, advocate of the natural world. Yumna Kassab writes on colonialism, conquest, occupation and dispossession- the modern Australian story. Plus- Ron Radford on the early colonial art in Tasmania, Prithvi Varatharajan on literary engagements with the non-human world, Rachel Weaver on currawongs, plus other essays from Carly Stone, Jacqui Shelton, Kath Kenny, Tim Dunlop and more.

New fiction from- Kristian Radford, Jo Langdon, Mohammed Massoud Morsi, Hollen Singleton and Rose Allan. New poetry from- Marina Hazard, Andrew Sant, Anthony Lynch, Wen-Juenn Lee, Carl Walsh and more.

Reviews include Melody Paloma on Evelyn Araluen’s Dropbear, Scott Limbick on Martin McKenzie-Murray’s The Speechwriter and Mira Schlosberg on Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed.