Helen O'Neil takes us inside the development of Labor's long-awaited Cultural Policy, and the future of the policy under a new government. Rebecca Harkins-Cross brings us the first in a series on new media art in Australia with an essay looking at the revolutionary ways Indigenous Australian artists are using video. Jennifer Mills quits poetry and ponders the peculiar life of the self-declared poet while Rebecca Giggs takes us into the wide blue yonder in pursuit of a mysterious giant eyeball.

Lesley Harding and artist Rebecca Mayo walk the Merri Creek wearing some very special garments and Hilary McPhee undertakes the fraught process of archiving the past. Journalist Jill Jolliffe contemplates her eventful visits to war-torn Angola in the early 1990s and Ellena Savage takes us to Bougainville and an uneasy adjustment to tropical living.

There’s new fiction from Briohny Doyle, Mireille Juchau and Anika Quayle and sparkling poetry from Eileen Chong, Elizabeth Lawso, Chris Mansell, Kate Middleton and many more.