MEANJIN BACK ISSUE

Haunted
Vol 60, no. 1, 2000

‘I was walking among ghosts, in company I felt so at home in. Company. There's nobody there, and I'm at home. There I am in these god-forsaken death camps and I don't want to leave.’

Lily Brett

The past – alive, powerful and insistently present – is the theme of this Meanjin.

Melissa Lucashenko kicks off the issue in intriguing style with 'Not a Ghost Story', Tom Griffiths meditates on writing, history and truth, and Yu Jian (in a lovely translation from Simon Patton) contemplates the mysteries of today's Tibet.

Questions recur, not only of historical loss, death and grief but of seeking the truth in the present, the words to express it and ways to acknowledge it.

Two pasts, particularly, haunt this issue: the ruthless, centralised machinery of genocide that was the Holocaust, and the sustained and devastating attacks on Indigenous cultures and communities that mark recent Australian history. Lily Brett speaks of visiting the Nazi death camps and coming to terms with her parents' unspeakable past, while Klaus Neumann interviews Germans living with the legacy of those atrocities. Chris Cunneen, Terry Libesman and Rosemary van den Berg write of Reconciliation. They consider, respectively, the skepticism evident in government policy and Nyoongar perceptions.

The issue also features fiction from James Hawthorne, Mireille Juchau, Morris Lurie and Ingrid Woodrow, and poetry from Michael Brennan, MTC Cronin, Kate Lilley, Zan Ross, Rory Steele and others.