Arena – Critical * Radical * Australia * Earth

11 Sep 2026

In either case, the AfD’s landslide win is a pivotal moment for Germany. For the first time since 1945, an extremist right party has the opportunity to lead a state government. How did it come to that?

System Collapse? Homelessness in the Northern Territory

Arena Online

Liam Grealy

11 Sep 2026

Are we approaching system collapse, or living through it? It is impossible to know, but it is certainly the case that the settler-colonial provision of housing and the response to homelessness have never been adequate to need in the NT.

Living with the Violence of the Past

Arena Quarterly no.26

Mark Furlong

Jun 2026

I am in a tangle of emotions, I am contemplating my own complicity.

Pre-Fascist Space-Time, Forever on the Move

Arena Quarterly no.26

Mitchell Welch

Jun 2026

America is presently Making Itself Great Again. Nicolás Maduro is rotting in a Brooklyn prison cell. The Ayatollah is dead... the world has found itself in a very Pynchonian moment.

On Hilarity

Arena Quarterly no.26

Robert DiNapoli

Jun 2026

Our vexed times could do with a bit more of hilarity, as noble and salubrious a friend as humankind has ever known, and a bit of a hoyden into the bargain.

Universities Charge Towards Black Holes of Change

Arena Online

Paul James

23 Aug 2026

What all of these slogans offer is a black hole of content-flexible hope. Our university—insert name here—exists in the world, and therefore the world will be a better place. We are the place where ‘great minds collide’. We are the space of hope, of abstract empty hope that can be filled with whatever you desire.

Deepening Symbolic Recognition

Arena Quarterly no.26

Dan Tout

Jun 2026

The book negotiates a complex task in addressing two audiences at once: non-Aboriginal Australians seeking to understand urban Aboriginal experience in the context of Treaty, and a younger generation of Aboriginal Melburnians who, as Andrews puts it, ‘are searching’ for their community’s history, and ‘are hungry for it’.

Strike Camps: Aboriginal Mining Camps of the 1950s and 1960s

Arena Online

Darren Jorgensen

23 Aug 2026

The photographs of the strike camps illuminate a little-known part of Australian and Aboriginal history, in which Aboriginal people ran their own companies and communities long before the government began to support Land Rights and legislate for Native Title.

EVENT: Artificial Intelligence and Work in a Remade World

Arena Online

7 Aug 2026

Wednesday, 12th August; 6pm for a 6:30pm start; Trades Hall; Tickets are $10*

The High Cost of the Gaslight Industry

Arena Online

Robyn Gulliver

7 Aug 2026

The fossil fuel industry has spent decades teaching us where to look. It fixes our gaze on their profits, dressed up as our cost of living, and on a panic at the petrol bowser, while the real cost is paid somewhere much quieter: in our children’s lungs, one kitchen at a time.

From the Archive

Green Pathways to a People’s Future

Arena Quarterly no. 1

Adam Bandt

‘Fire’ may be an appropriate way to think and talk about the climate-change emergency, not just because we are literally dealing with a burning world but also because it does not bring with it the concerns associated with ‘rule by emergency’.

From the Archive

The Tip of the Democracy-Sinking Iceberg

Timothy Erik Ström

There is a curious and seldom-told backstory and parallel story to the high-profile Cambridge Analytica scandal, one that makes the notorious firm seem like the tip of the democracy-sinking iceberg.

Pauline Conversions? Australian Politics after Farrer

Arena Quarterly no.26

Guy Rundle

Jun 2026

The spectacle of One Nation’s sudden success seems to have stunned many into an almost ritualistic recitative of cod-sociological explanations for right-wing movements.