Editor's note
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Some of Australia’s finest writers are academic researchers and over the past year, we’ve been proud to publish them on a dizzying array of topics.
Sally Breen described the emotional rollercoaster that is the plight of the sports fan, Frank Bongiorno pondered our history of political insults, Cris Brack considered what
we lose when an urban tree is cut down, and Kevin Brophy unpicked the brilliance of David Malouf’s poems.
Saskia Beudel went frogwatching, Alastair Blanshard watched Australian Ninja Warrior and Stephanie Trigg read the poem Eurydice to her literature class.
These, and more, are our picks for the best writing of 2018.
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Suzy Freeman-Greene
Section Editor: Arts + Culture
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Whistling tree frogs, Litoria verreauxii, are one of the species monitored around Canberra for their response to climate change.
Catching the eye/flickr
Saskia Beudel, University of Canberra
Climate change can seem far removed from our everyday lives, which is why a citizen science program measuring how frogs are dealing with a warming world is so important.
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India Henry after getting to the end of the course in Australian Ninja Warrior.
Screenshot from Youtube
Alastair Blanshard, The University of Queensland
Ninja Warrior is the latest attempt to appropriate an ancient artform for a mass audience. But the ancient ninja moved in silence. Anonymous, he never bothered to develop signature dance moves.
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Hydra 1960, including Leonard Cohen (bearded, left) and Redmond Wallis (centre right in cotton shirt).
Photographer unknown. Reproduced with the permission of Dorothy Wallis.
Tanya Dalziell, University of Western Australia; Paul Genoni, Curtin University
Leonard Cohen's final (posthumous) book was released in Australia this week. Another new book sheds light on Cohen's life on Hydra in the 1960s and the relationships he forged with Antipodeans seeking liberation there.
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Felicity Burke/The Conversation
Cris Brack, Australian National University
Urban trees are literally made with the help of human breath – they turn the carbon dioxide we breathe out into the building blocks of plant growth. So your local trees have a piece of you inside them.
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Kathleen Petyarre looking across Atnangker country, Northern Territory, December 2000.
Photograph Ian North; courtesy Wakefield Press
Christine Judith Nicholls, Flinders University
Petyarre, who won the Telstra prize for Indigenous art in 1996, has died in Alice Springs.
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Lleyton Hewitt in 2004. No one who has ever watched Lleyton play one of his epic matches comes out a hater.
DEAN LEWINS/AAP
Sally Breen, Griffith University
Sport is a dominant thread in Australia’s cultural DNA. But it’s also divisive.
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A makeshift memorial to Eurydice Dixon at Princes Park on June 16.
Ellen Smith/AAP
Stephanie Trigg, University of Melbourne
Reading the poem Eurydice to her students unleashed surprising emotions for Stephanie Trigg. But literature works in mysterious, unpredictable ways, highlighting the impossibility of trigger warnings.
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The insults have becoming increasingly personal, but they don’t always work.
AAP/Lukas Coch
Frank Bongiorno, Australian National University
Creating epithets for political opponents has a long history in Australia – and when it works, it can be devastating.
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David Malouf’s poetry collection An Open Book spans “a Beurre Bosch pear/in a fruit bowl to the planet”.
Shutterstock
Kevin Brophy, University of Melbourne
Malouf's late return to poetry seems to bring him back in a new way to steadying poems that do justice to the open gaze, the sly wit, the swift imagination and the poise he has in spades.
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A curry-themed shoulder bag: ‘Curry’ is a word that no self-respecting subcontinental would own without a thousand caveats attached.
shutterstock
Mridula Nath Chakraborty, Monash University
Whether being called 'curry munchers' or pigeonholed as authorities on a dish largely invented by the British, diasporic South Asians are emulsified in a deep pool of curry.
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Featured jobs
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La Trobe University — Melbourne, Victoria
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RMIT University — Melbourne, Victoria
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Western Sydney University — Kingswood, New South Wales
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Griffith University — Brisbane City, Queensland
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