Julianne Schultz

And so Griffith Review is ten. It’s a credit to the publishing smarts of founding editor Julianne Schultz that the journal is now a fixture on the cultural landscape, alongside the country’s older literary journals. Griffith is the vantage not of the outraged so much as the frustrated, a reliable forum for passionate criticisms aimed at the inadequacy of political discourse in contemporary Australia. This inadequacy is what Schultz calls the ‘shrill negative timidity and lack of ambition’ in the way political, economic, social, and environmental challenges are framed in public debate. For instance, in one of the liveliest pieces in this issue, Melissa Lucashenko rails against the stereotyping of our urban poor. She writes this as one herself now living in cheap housing in Logan City, Brisbane, one of Australia’s ten poorest urban areas. Quoting Orwell, she finds a kind of relief, being at last genuinely ‘down and out’. It gives her a more nuanced, compassionate perspective – the desideratum of all Griffith contributors – on debates around housing, drugs, and domestic violence.

This year’s annual fiction edition of Griffith Review – a collection of six stories chosen by competition – is dedicated to reviving the novella. In the golden age of print, the novella was mostly considered a literary misfit, too long for magazines, too short to publish profitably in a single book. It is a fair assumption that with new infrastructure provided by digital technology the novella might at last reach its market. Some hypothesise that it might even become popular; a story that can be read in one sitting might stand a chance of squeezing into the daily gavage of online ‘content’. True to these ideas, each piece published in Griffith Review 38: The Novella Project is available for individual digital purchase.

The decision to use Ned Kelly’s last words as the subtitle of Griffith Review 33 was most unwise. This well-worn line threatens to overshadow the journal’s contents, which are otherwise fresh and intelligent.

'It’s in your hands, Julianne,’ proclaims an e-mail from Barack Obama. So opens the latest Griffith Review, which explores the many ways that, across the globe, individuals and groups are taking social, political and environmental matters into their own hands. Addressee aside, the Obama e-mail sent to editor Schultz in the final week of the US election campaign landed in the virtual hands of millions. But as Schultz notes, the Obama campaign saw ‘social networking’ on a massive scale, made millions feel involved and, she posits, saw a concomitant end to the ‘era of mass media politics’. Marian Arkin’s memoir picks up on campaign engagement, recalling her involvement with a large-scale community of volunteer lawyers working to protect the integrity of the US election process. Arkin’s article provides a useful guide to those who find the US electoral college system a mystery.