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October brings The Monthly’s annual Culture issue, celebrating and interrogating the best in arts and culture for today. It’s also a special edition that – on the eve of the referendum for the Voice to Parliament – pins our colours to the mast and shouts “Yes” from the first page.

The cover design is an original commission by Kamilaroi artist Reko Rennie, who is also profiled in the magazine’s pages this month by author Claire G Coleman. The issue begins and ends with the Voice: a comment piece from Megan Davis and a reflective Life Sentences piece from Rachel Perkins, both arguing passionately about the need to understand this cultural moment beyond the symbolic.

Elsewhere across the issue, the intersection between the artistic and the politic is robustly interrogated. Celebrated filmmaker Bob Connolly began his career 30 years ago with a visit to PNG that shaped his creative and storytelling instincts. He returned earlier this year with award-winning photographer Stephen Dupont to capture the funeral of a complicated man of the highlands: Jo Leahy.

Plus Quentin Sprague on the inspiration that ensues from an architect’s work for two artists, Alison Croggon on the economic realities of arts work, Marieke Hardy on what happens when solitary writers collectivise, Robert Drewe on the kangaroo; Kerryn Goldsworthy on writer Robyn Davidson and so much more.