Unbearable Significance, or: As Australians Put It …

Main Article Content

Adrian Martin
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7964-8453

Abstract

I am writing from another country, far away; I no longer live in Australia. Meaghan Morris is partly responsible for this. Let me explain.


At the end of 2011, I found myself reading the transcript of a long interview with Meaghan conducted by a Melbourne-based researcher, Lauren Bliss. In this discussion, Meaghan comments on the move, in the course of her professional life, to Hong Kong:


What I really wanted to do was what lots of students from Asia had been doing for decades, which is go and just live an everyday life in another country, have a job, and not go and study the society there as an academic specialty. Just go and know what it’s like to live as a foreigner working in a Chinese society.1

For many reasons, my life at that time had reached a kind of dead end; I felt that Australia had nothing more to offer me. Yet the thought of relocating elsewhere had never really occurred to me, or perhaps I had merely been successful in keeping that thought at bay.

Article Details

Section
The Meaghan Morris Festival
Author Biography

Adrian Martin, Monash University

Adrian Martin is an arts critic based in Vilassar de Mar, Spain. He is the author of eight books on cinema, most recent of which is an essay collection titled 'Mysteries of Cinema' (2018); and his ongoing archive website of film reviews, covering forty years of writing, can be found at: http://www.filmcritic.com.au.