The Monthly

3 weeks ago | themonthly.com.au | Jo Chandler |George Megalogenis |Madison Griffiths |Richard Denniss

It’s 4.30am when two grey-haired women pick their way by torchlight across the logging coupe in New South Wales’s Bulga State Forest. They plant a pair of green plastic chairs in the churned earth under a monster tree-harvester. They get some help bolting onto the machine – chunky D-locks looped around their necks, the weight nestled on rolls of towelling. Then it’s just the two of them. Dawn dials up the birdsong and illuminates a wash of mist rolling through the trees they have come to save.

3 weeks ago | themonthly.com.au | Simon Webster |George Megalogenis |Jo Chandler |Madison Griffiths

Coming back to Perth after a decent stint away, one can feel a bit like Rip Van Winkle waking from his 20-year snooze to find his village near unrecognisable, the American Revolution having come and gone. The changes were perhaps not so drastic at my in-laws’ place – there were now purple creepers in the garden beds, and a new armchair in the living room – but things were still different, slightly askew. And it wasn’t just decorative. Open a window and you’d feel it: change was in the air.

3 weeks ago | themonthly.com.au | Madison Griffiths |George Megalogenis |Jo Chandler |Richard Denniss

In a Quiet cul-de-sac in Wodonga, on the border of Victoria and New South Wales, Serena Brejcha retrieves a two-metre-long banner from its cardboard sheath. Quietly, she unfurls it. It is barely January, and her house is still decorated with many a Christmas ornament. Given the banner’s scale, she and her husband clasp a hold of each end so I am able to read its provocation.

3 weeks ago | themonthly.com.au | Alex Miller |George Megalogenis |Jo Chandler |Madison Griffiths

New short fiction about a life changed by an incident on a remote property outside Sydney, where the city’s youth come to drink and shoot guns When I heard the first shot I was alone in the cottage that afternoon, sitting at the kitchen table answering a friend’s letter. I stopped writing and looked up. The shot was followed by several more in quick succession. One or two sounded to me to be rifle fire, the snap of the echoes going back and forth across this narrow neck of the valley.

3 weeks ago | themonthly.com.au | George Megalogenis |Jo Chandler |Madison Griffiths |Richard Denniss

Beyond the deals that will be needed to form Australia’s next government, the outcome of this federal election will be determined by a wildcard influence from outside our politics – the Trump presidency There was a time when the leaders of Australia’s Labor and Liberal parties refused to entertain the question of minority government, and no one seemed to mind. It was just about the final taboo in our politics, and it relied on the assumption that Australians crave stability above all else.