Cirrus@Austlit

'There’s a strange elasticity of time at play in the latest issue of Meanjin, which seems fitting, perhaps, for the particular moment in which we find ourselves, unmoored from our regular habits and lives, newly conscious of our place in history. Many of the pieces within its pages were clearly written in the early months of this year – such is the nature of lead times in publishing – and are concerned with the horrors of the past summer: the devastating fires that destroyed massive amounts of bushland and habitat and choked cities with smoke for weeks; our politicians’ failure to properly respond. And then a new crisis emerged, and in many ways eclipsed this, because of the immediacy with which it affected all of our lives, and the profundity of the change. It’s evident that a good number of the pieces have been rapidly updated to reflect this, to begin to grapple with what an event such as the coronavirus might mean, as seen from the vantage point of the early days of the pandemic. Jonathan Green’s opening editorial explicitly speaks to this “moment of such extraordinary and irreversible disruption” where “all that seemed so solidly certain [has been] made tremulous and thin”. So the issue as a whole feels almost like a time capsule, a reminder of what the world was like before we knew precisely how it would change.' (Introduction)