The September Monthly is here, and our writers are unearthing the uneasy truths and overlooked stories that underpin the world around us.
If you’ve ever worried about the finer details of “user terms and conditions” on an app, then Christine Kenneally’s cover story may not reassure. Particularly if those worries correspond with the worries of parental responsibility. Privacy and security are twin pillars of our ultra-connected age, and our assumptions about who owns an image – particularly of our children – might just require some closer examination. Kenneally’s essay raises serious questions about the regulations around the childcare sector and data retention.
We’ve reached a point where the need for a transition to renewable energy and to scale back coal-fired power is widely accepted, but much of the language around that transition – around supporting communities and retraining workers – is shorthand that fails to be borne out in reality. Anthony Ham visits Victoria’s Latrobe Valley to take in some of the towns where the cost of change is proving devastating.
Elsewhere in the September issue, Paul Barry previews a case about to go before the Federal Court – a tale of big money and bigger deception that ties back to the “Saviour of Steel”, Sanjeev Gupta. James Bradley visits caves in Sulawesi where the discovery of ancient rock art is upending all understandings of human evolution and prehistory. And George Megalogenis looks at the historical mistakes Labor has made about immigration, and the risk that they’re in the process of repeating them.
Plus 50 years of the Malthouse Theatre, remembering the radical artist Vivienne Binns, Rachel Cusk’s newest fiction and more besides.