The Monthly has been published now for 20 years and we read the October 2025 issue with interest.
There is Julia Baird's intro to this year's ABC Boyer Lectures, this time featuring five lecturers: Justin Wolfers, expat economics professor; John Anderson, former Deputy PM; Larissa Behrendt, Euahleyai/Gamillaroi, UTS Professor, ABC presenter, one of Defending Country's distinguished Supporters; Amelia Lester, editor at Foreign Policy; James Curran, USyd Professor. 'Hopefully', concludes Baird, 'the ABC Boyer Lectures will provide some ignition points for ideas, for agreement on who we are, and, eventually agreement on a shared determination to remain fair, equal, decent and free'. The Lectures commence 19 October and will be printed on The Monthly's website.
Ten critics nominate their cultural highlights for The Monthly Awards 2025. Among the critics are Sebastian Smee, Marcia Langton, Peter Craven and Santilla Chingaipe.
Ashley Hay in 'Tree of Life' writes about Archie Moore's (Kamilaroi/Bigambul/British/Scottish), work kith and kin now at Queensland's Gallery of Modern Art. The work is five metres high and 15 metres wide, including a table carrying the details of more than 550 Indigenous deaths in Australian custody since 1991. Ellie Buttrose, curator, says, 'This work is about being both colonised and coloniser ... Archie's father's family "won" land in a ballot; that land was Kamilaroi land. So there has to be truth-telling from both sides. Australia holds cultures that have existed for more than 65,000 years as well as a colonising culture. You have to hold these two things together; they're inseparable.'
Finally, quoted by The Monthly's editor, Michael Williams, there is a powerful paragraph from the Boyer Lectures of 2009 by the late historian, Inga Clendinnen, who in turn referenced WEH Stanner's 1968 lectures:
Those [Stanner's] lectures were and remain electric, charged with anger for the physical and psychological misery inflicted on Aboriginal Australians by a collection of latecomers who first claimed possession of everything they saw, and then began a process of settlement which devastated both the land and the clans who had lived in respectful interaction with it for hundreds of generations.
Williams' comment: 'Her argument - that any truly democratic nation needed to truthfully account for its past in all its complexity and shame - resonates deeply with conversations today about the need for national truth-telling'.
Picture credit: cover of Inga Clendinnen, True Stories (2008), based on her 1999 Boyer Lectures.
