Matt Chun

Matt Chun, previously known as Matthew Jones, is an Australian children's book illustrator and writer.

Chun's books include Australian Animals, Australian Mammals, Australian Sea Life, Australian Birds, Day Break (with Amy McQuire), and the pop-up book Pull It Down. His work has been published in Overland, Meanjin, Liminal Magazine, and The Sunday Paper.^[1][2] His books have been shortlisted for the Australian Book Industry Awards,^[3] the Children's Book Council of Australia Awards,^[4] the Australian Book Design Awards,^[5] and the Shirley Hannan National Portrait Award.^[6]

In 2019, he was appointed Children's Literature Fellow at the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne.^[7] He cut ties with the library in April 2024, citing political differences.^[8]

Chun's artwork has been exhibited at the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art,^[9] the S.H. Ervin Gallery,^[10] the Nishi Gallery in Canberra,^[11] the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre,^[12] and the Wollongong Art Gallery.^[13]

He has received a number of grants from Creative Australia, including in 2017 to attend an artist's residency at the Bamboo Curtain Studio in Taiwan^[12] and in 2023 to develop a children's picture book about policing in Australia with writer Amy McQuire.^[14][15]

Chun is a founding editor of The Sunday Paper, which he co-created in 2021 after calling for a boycott of Schwartz Media, the publisher of The Saturday Paper and The Monthly.^[16][17]

In 2016 Chun's cafe in Bermagui, Mister Jones, attracted national media attention when its sign describing Australia Day as "National Dickhead Day" went viral on social media. Chun reported receiving death threats from people offended by the sign.^[18][19]

Chun has called for boycotts of arts organisations including the National Gallery of Victoria, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, and the National Gallery of Australia, which he accuses of supporting Zionism, and of media outlets including the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Guardian Australia, which he has described as "enemy media".^[20][21][22]

Chun described the 7 October attacks in Israel as "a courageous act of revolutionary decolonisation."^[20][23] Soon after the attacks, he posted the message: "Power to the freedom fighters. Love to the martyrs. Death to the occupation. Resistance by any means necessary. Liberation from the River to the Sea."^[24]

In February 2024, Chun, with Clementine Ford, Randa Abdel-Fattah, and others, published the leaked transcripts of a 600-member WhatsApp group for Jewish Australian writers, arts workers, and academics, along with a spreadsheet containing the names, occupations, social media profiles and photographs of group members and other Jewish creatives.^[25][26][27] People listed in the spreadsheet and their families subsequently received death threats.^[28][29] The incident was widely cited in public discussions of new doxing laws that were introduced in Australia in 2024.^[30][25][31]

In August 2025, the Herald Sun reported that Victoria Police had received a letter from a former Victorian Director of Public Prosecutions asking it to investigate Chun for alleged terrorist activity. The police investigation concluded that there was insufficient evidence to press charges.^[32]

On 14 December 2025, sixteen people (one gunman, eleven other men, three women, and a ten-year-old girl) were killed in a terrorist attack at Bondi Beach while attending a Hanukkah celebration organised by Chabad.^[33] Two weeks later, Chun published an essay entitled "We Don't Mourn Fascists", criticising public expressions of grief for the victims. He argued that such public mourning reflected "liberal capitulation" to "the Zionist propaganda machine", and criticised the lack of attention paid to Muslim and Indigenous victims of violence.^{[34][35][36][20]} Chun wrote that the Bondi Hanukkah event was "hosted by the Zionist Jewish-supremacist organisation Chabad", which he accused of close connections to the Israel Defense Forces and of "actively, publicly, and extensively help[ing] to facilitate ... the imperialist holocaust of Palestine".^[34] Responses to the essay were written by Nick Dyrenfurth in The Australian,^[37] by Lillian Kline in the Australian Financial Review^[38] and by Guy Rundle, Tim Dunlop and Omar Sakr on Substack.^[39][40][41] Max J & Porco, writing in Communist Unity's Partisan! magazine, characterised Chun's politics as a "deeply nihilistic and paranoid form of 'anti-colonial' politics which is more concerned with moralist justifications for mass shootings than putting forward a positive program for the liberation of Indigenous peoples".^[35]

Following the publication of Chun's essay, the hate crimes unit of the New South Wales Police Force were reported to be investigating his remarks.^[42][43] Dymocks bookshops withdrew Chun's books from sale^[44][45] and the University of Queensland Press (UQP) announced that it had suspended publication of Bila, a River Cycle, a children's picture book written by Wiradjuri poet Jazz Money and illustrated by Chun.^[46][47] In April 2026, UQP confirmed that it would not be publishing Bila and that it planned to pulp the 5000 copies that had been printed.^[48][49] Several UQP authors cut ties with the publisher in protest,^[50] including Randa Abdel-Fattah, who described the publisher's decision as "shameful and cowardly" and added that the public could "see through the weaponisation of accusations of anti-Semitism to censor and punish voices that denounce and oppose [Israel]".^[48]

During a federal Senate Estimates hearing in February 2026, Liberal senator Sarah Henderson asked the head of Creative Australia about its funding of Chun's work in light of his comments about the Bondi shooting.^[51] In March 2026, Creative Australia said that it would not seek advice about recovering Chun's grants, as the funded work had been completed. The organisation said that it would seek to update its future contracts to allow termination of funding should a recipient engage in hate speech or racial or religious vilification.^[52]

Chun has a maternal great-grandfather from China and a Jewish grandmother. He says that he rarely "foregrounds" his heritage in his activism, due to his view that "identity politics" is often "counter-revolutionary".^[53]

Chun was previously known as Matthew Jones.^[54] He has written about his decision to adopt the surname of his ancestor Phillip Jo Chun, his great grandfather, who arrived in Australia from China in 1900.^[55][56] After his parents divorced, Chun and his sister changed their names with their mother when she dropped their father's name and reverted to "Chun".^[57]

Chun's partner is also his publisher at Slingshot Books, Tess Cullity.^[58] His sister is the journalist and University of Melbourne academic Mell Chun.^[56] He has a son.^[55][1]