Catriona Menzies-Pike

What’s this? Yet more research concluding that robust public investment in the arts yields economic benefits?

A great outcome for Ireland, and a rebuke to all those tired cliches about freeloading artists sapping the resources of the state.

But also, art enriches us all, economic benefits or no.

Who killed Meanjin? And why won’t Melbourne University Publishing engage with efforts to save it?

New:
A deep dive with some alarming new revelations on the silencing of one of the few remaining independent progressive voices in Australian media. Who killed Meanjin?

Very easy to do:

support.academia.edu/hc/en-us/art...

"It's been put to me that literary magazines are ephemeral, and when established ones close, their absence creates a space for new magazines to thrive... And yet in Australia in 2025, the space left when a cultural organisation closes is hardly fertile terrain. It's more like a vacuum"

So long, Meanjin Meanjin down the drain, criticism still in crisis – plus Wuthering Heights and a withering review

New newsletter out in the world: just one more thing about the Meanjin debacle; a 1963 open letter on funding Ozlit mags; a tough review of a book that will sell; a bad date movie.

infra-dig.ghost.io/so-long-mean...

After Kirk, right-wingers double down on eliminating opponents As of this writing, there are few solid clues as to the identity or affiliations of the individual/s responsible for the assassination of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk on Wednesday at at Utah ...

diving back into the newsletter with a new outlook www.the-end.news/after-kirk-r...

Thank you - I’m still quite enraged to have had occasion to write it

Thanks for sharing Alice. You can imagine all the deep sighing and hea-shaking I did while writing this piece. What a shambles

Thanks! I hope MUP gets around to answering some questions about it all

I wrote for Crikey about the decision to shut Meanjin down - and to sever a connection to a hopeful progressive vision of Australian culture

Thanks for sharing, Martin!

I am distressed and angered by this decision - but want to interject that in the current dire Australian cultural funding environment, and in the context of equally dire cuts to universities, a few hundred thousand dollars is hardly a trivial demand. Our sector has been pared to the bones.

Grim tidings here for Meanjin staff and contributors, and for Ozlit more broadly. A surprise to me to because I’d been under the impression that Meanjin’s situation at UniMelb afforded the journal some enviable financial security. Clearly I was wrong. I have a lotta questions about this.

WUTHERING goddamnit

I thought 2025 had pretty much drained my capacity for contributing to le discourse. Thank you, Emerald Fennell, for restoring me momentarily to the moment.

Valentine’s Day release wtf. Withering Heights is a helluva novel but a date movie it is not!! (unless cursed intergenerational abuse narratives put you in the mood for lurve.)

This maxim applies to the film heralded by the lurid trailer below or any other of the thousands of WH adaptations.

No one wants me in their book club (and for good reason)

So no book club then?

Israel has killed 180 Palestinian journalists since Oct 2023. There are 120 of us in this video remembering our slain Palestinian colleagues - it's staggering to see so many faces and realise that more than this number of media workers have been killed.
#StopKillingJournalists #SanctionIsraelNow

Pissants by Brandon Jack review – is this novel a critique or a celebration of toxic masculinity? Even it isn’t sure The former AFL player’s debut novel barely has a plot, following a group of aggressive, entitled footy players as they get wasted and treat women like props

I wrote about Brandon Jack’s debut novel Pissants for Guardian Australia. It evoked in me a similar response to Trainspotting back in the day, and I guess whether or not that’s a positive evaluation depends on your reading of that novel. www.theguardian.com/books/2025/a...

Statement by Prime Minister Carney on Canada’s recognition of a Palestinian state For decades, it was hoped that this outcome would be achieved as part of a peace process built around a negotiated settlement between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority.

Carney’s statement here: www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/stat...

Your move, Albo. It’s time.

One assumes a big advance to make up for the rush and utter embarrassment

I read your excellent piece just before I stumbled on this announcement so I was primed for disgust. Side observation: I can see how a 3-voice conversation might play out in interesting ways through a newsletter or other form of serial digital publication. The quick book just seems such a waste

(And let’s be real: this one is going to be very very sneery.)

Collaborative work demands even more time - if you take it seriously. I will likely write more about this when I’m not on hols with my kids. Quick turnaround books cobbled together by high profile writers for the festival circuit are an insult to literature.

I know some readers have claimed they’d read Helen Garner’s shopping list, that reading /anything/ an author writes is a sign of devotion - rubbish. Undercooked books are the bane of Australian publishing - as if a book written in such a short turnaround can have any lasting cultural impact.

Cover of forthcoming book by Helen Garner, Sarah Krasnostein and Chloe Hooper, a blatant cash-in likely to have little cultural impact.

Usually when it comes to Oz publishing my default is to blame the broken system and cut authors some slack as they try to survive. Here? No way. These three authors each have the clout to demand the time to dignify their subject and, cough couch, the craft. What a repellent, shameless cash-in.

Help Wanted What they left out of the position description for the boss job at Writing Australia – plus John Jeremiah Sullivan, Jennifer Mills, Andrew Dean and Mel Brooks

I wrote about the kind of gutsy artist-centred leadership I’d like to see at Writihg Australia in the wake of the Lattouf decision and the Biennale debacle. (Am I holding my breath? No.) infra-dig.ghost.io/help-wanted/

Thanks Martin!