Articles by: Melinda Hinkson

Author Biography:

Melinda Hinkson is a social anthropologist. She is director of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies, and an Arena Publications editor.

Rupture in Remote Australia

Australians are being asked to vote in support of the constitutional establishment of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament while the work of successive governments, Coalition and Labor alike, has been complicit in the killing of First Nations people.

Reimagining Regional Relationships

…wheat exists in the world not only as a plant, a seed or even a material such as flour, but as ‘futures’ and other fictions traded on the Chicago Stock Exchange…

For Djab Wurrung trees and country

In nearly all cases where states require associations of traditional connection to be publicly performed in order to be recognised, the persons called upon and authorised to perform them have had their associations fractured by colonial dispossession.

Informit: To let things live: Anthropology, images and the breach of distance [Book Review]

Review(s) of: Roger Sandall's Films and Contemporary Anthropology: Explorations in the Aesthetic, the Existential and the Possible, by Lorraine Mortimer, Indiana University Press, 2019; Phone and Spear: A Yuta Anthropology, by Miyarrka Media, Goldsmiths Press, 2019.

Informit: Stop press

In April of this year, Arena said farewell to our most recent city centre, a former warehouse on Kerr Street, Fitzroy. It's the third city centre we've had since we established our first on Brunswick Street, North Fitzroy, in 1983. But the 2020 farewell had far greater significance, since it marked the conclusion of our active involvement with printing, both of our own publications and commercially, through a full-service firm. That would have been the…

Three Shots

The death of Kumanjayi Walker—the Northern Territory as police state

Informit: Three shots

The death of Kumanjayi Walker - the Northern Territory as police state 'Three shots were fired.' The acting deputy police commissioner of the Northern Territory thrust three fingers into the air as he addressed the crowd of grieving and angry residents who gathered on the Yuendumu basketball courts two days after Kumanjayi Walker had been shot and killed by police.

Informit: The trouble with hyper-mobility [Book Review]

Review(s) of: This land is our land: An immigrant's Manifesto, by Suketu Mehta, (Jonathan Cape, 2019).

Editorial – issue 51/52: In Humanity’s Wake

This special issue of Arena Journal addresses the accelerating structural displacement of human participation in contemporary society.

Informit: In humanity’s wake

Informit: Dislocation, dreams and storytelling [Book Review]

Review(s) of: Position doubtful: Mapping landscapes and memories, by Kim Mahood (Scribe, 2016), Tracker, by Alexis Wright (Giramondo, 2017).

Informit: Outrage