The year is halfway through, and the June Monthly considers the past, makes sense of the stormy present and proposes a path into our uncertain future. After a leading role in the unsuccessful referendum for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, Thomas Mayo took his bearings, making sense of the deep conversations he’d taken part in across the country and considering how best to move forwards with a new model of First Nations advocacy. His cover essay for the June issue of the magazine makes a rhetorical case for embracing the prime minister’s call for “progressive patriotism”. Love of Country, as Mayo argues, should be an inclusive concept rather than a cruel and exclusive one.
Russell Marks takes in the state of youth justice around Australia, seeing in the “tough on crime” rhetoric in the NT and Queensland elections a harbinger of how the conversation has so radically moved from evidence-based policy to punitive saber rattling.
Margaret Simons returns to the Philippines to catch up with the story that won her a Walkley back in 2015: finding justice and repair for the children of Australian sex workers.
And esteemed scientist Tim Flannery recounts the expeditions into West Papuan forests that have uncovered two species of possum, long thought extinct. (Turns out they weren’t dead, just playing possum.)
All that plus books, TV, cinema, the federal budget, 1960s Italian-Australian communists, remembering the late David Malouf, and more. That classic Monthly mix.