Archive: Arena Quarterly #23

Israel, Intifada, Infanticide

Arena Quarterly no. 23

Christopher Wise

Oct 2025

International condemnation increases of Israel’s mass killing of Gaza’s children, yet is inadequate to the catastrophe. Can veteran writers offer a path forward?

The Fearless and the Horrors

Arena Quarterly no. 23

Julie Stephens

Oct 2025

The biography of a leading Australian feminist activist makes visible the shifting values and subjectivities in the movement’s past half-century here.

Climate catastrophe: is rapid cooling now essential?

David Spratt

12 Oct 2025

Geoengineering, celebrated by techno-utopians, is no long-term solution. But human survival may require that we advocate for it.

MMT, Marxism and Crisis

Arena Quarterly no. 23

Owen Bennett

Oct 2025

Does Modern Monetary Theory offer pathways out of capitalism, or is it financialisation by other means? Is the left opposition to it a great strategic error?

poem: national vape ban

Arena Quarterly no. 23

Sian Vate

Oct 2025

crack dawn after breath...

Universal Estrangement

Arena Quarterly no. 23

Revan Oluklu

Oct 2025

Native Manitoban Matthew Rankin mixes his own story with Iranians in Winnipeg, their lives criss-crossing. Migrant story? Fantasia? We never find out.

Poland: Bordering on the Modern?

Arena Quarterly no. 23

Paulina Olszanka

Oct 2025

Young voters throw out the Law and Justice Party, as the economy roars ahead. But the country’s border status creates a distinct condition between atomised modernity and national revival.

The Incompleat Angler

Arena Quarterly no. 23

Daniel Lopez

Oct 2025

Pursuing the elusive estuary perch, and the lure of lure Devilbend Reservoir, Victoria At dusk, a flock of welcome swallows plays fleetingly above the weeds that ring the shallows of Devilbend Reservoir. It’s over in minutes, a choreography of swooping, darting, ascending and departing. The estuary perch, eyes like large, dark saucers, do not look […]

Minority Retort

Arena Quarterly no. 23

Richard King

Oct 2025

Embracing an individualist model of identity, Left progressives now participate in a ‘mad scramble for recognition’ in which the weaponisation of lived experience, an obsession with language and competing victimhood combine to create a ‘playbook of grievance’ that is at once ridiculed and adopted by the Right.

Abundant Abundance

Arena Quarterly no. 23

Paul James

Oct 2025

Abundance, Labor’s new favourite book, is the latest in a long line of fantasies of human deliverance through plenty.

And the Big Men Cry

Arena Quarterly no. 23

Jack Hynes

Oct 2025

AFL footballers, treated as Gods, visibly suffer the commodification and anomie of millions, becoming cautionary tales. The AFL needs to change its approach to this dilemma.

The fringe still bangs: A reply to Justin O’Connor

Arena Quarterly no. 23

Mark Gibson, Tony Moore

Oct 2025

Fringe culture lives on, but in a changed form, demanding both critical and descriptive accounts; a reply to Justin O’Connor.