Matt Chun | |
|---|---|
| Born | Matthew Jones |
| Occupations | Artist, writer, and illustrator |
| Era | 21st century |
| Artwork | |
| Occupation | Picture book illustrator |
| Notable work | Bila: A River Cycle (writen by Jazz Money) |
| Writing | |
| Genre | Opinion |
| Notable work | We don't mourn fascists (2026) |
| Instagram information | |
| Page | |
| Substack information | |
| Newsletter | |
| Notes | @mattchun |
| X information | |
| Handle | |
| Years active | 2016–2022 |
| Website | mattchun |
| Editor | Matt Chun (and others) |
|---|---|
| Frequency | Irregular |
| Format | |
| Publisher |
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| Founder | Matt Chun (and others) |
| First issue | December 2021 |
| Website | "The Sunday Paper" – via www.slingshotbooks.com.au. |
| Instagram information | |
| Pages | |
| Substack information | |
| Newsletter | |
| Notes | @thesundaypaperpodcast |
Matt Chun (born Matthew Jones} is an Australian children's book illustrator, writer, and activist. He is a founding editor of The Sunday Paper, which he co-created in 2021. He has been criticised in the media for expressing his anti-Zionist views.
After his parents divorced, Chun and his sister changed their names with their mother, who dropped their father's name "Jones" and reverted to "Chun". Chun has written about his decision to adopt the surname, that originates from his maternal great-grandfather Phillip Jo Chun, who arrived in Australia from China in 1900. Chun also has a Jewish grandmother. However, despite frequent criticism from zionists, he rarely "foregrounds" his heritage in his anti-Zionist activism, due to his view that "identity politics" is often "counter-revolutionary" and that "to weaponise it would be disingenuous".
His name change recently drew the attention of critics in Australian and Israeli newspapers. An article in The Australian from 27 January 2025 claimed that Chun's "real name" is "Matthew Jones". It was one of many articles that month describing his name this way. The Financial Review claimed it was his "legal name".
His sister is the journalist and University of Melbourne academic Mell Chun. Chun's partner is also his publisher at Slingshot Books, Tess Cullity. He has a son.
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. His books have been shortlisted for the Australian Book Industry Awards, the Children's Book Council of Australia Awards, the Australian Book Design Awards, and the Shirley Hannan National Portrait Award.
In 2019, he was appointed Children's Literature Fellow at the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne. He cut ties with the library in April 2024, citing political differences.
Chun's artwork has been exhibited at the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, the S.H. Ervin Gallery, the Nishi Gallery in Canberra, the Casula Powerhouse Arts Centre, and the Wollongong Art Gallery.
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 and in 2023 to develop a children's picture book about policing in Australia with writer Amy McQuire.
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. The Sunday Paper was started during the popular uprisings of May 2021 in Palestine. A particular controversy at the time were calls for boycott of the Sydney Writers' Festival, which has accepted $20,000 of funding from the State of Israel. Issue 2, from May 2022, showed the Palestinian red triangle on the cover. The red inverted triangle later became controversial due to its use by Palestinian militants to mark Israeli military targets during the Gaza war.
Chun's sister, Mel Chun, is the audio producer for the Sunday Paper podcast.
In 2016 Chun's café in Bermagui, Mister Jones,[clarification needed] 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.
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".
Chun described the 7 October attacks in Israel as "a courageous act of revolutionary decolonisation". 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".
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. People listed in the spreadsheet and their families subsequently received death threats. The incident was widely cited in public discussions of new doxing laws that were introduced in Australia in 2024.
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.
On 14 December 2025, 16 people were killed in a terrorist attack at Bondi Beach while attending a Hanukkah celebration organised by Chabad. Two weeks later, Chun published an essay entitled "We Don't Mourn Fascists", criticising public expressions of grief for the victims and the lack of attention paid to Muslim and Indigenous victims of violence. Chun wrote that Chabad is a Jewish-supremacist organisation which has close connections to the Israel Defense Forces which "actively, publicly, and extensively help[s] to facilitate ... the imperialist holocaust of Palestine". Responses to the essay were written by Nick Dyrenfurth in The Australian, by Lillian Kline in the Australian Financial Review and by others on Substack.
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. Dymocks bookshops withdrew Chun's books from sale 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. In April 2026, UQP confirmed that it would not be publishing Bila. Several UQP authors cut ties with the publisher in protest, including Randa Abdel-Fattah.
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. In March 2026, Creative Australia said that the funded work had already been completed, but 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.
In August 2026, Chun accused the novelist Richard Flanagan of "ableism" after Flanagan, in an address to the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, criticised the pulping of Bila but described Chun's essay on the Bondi shootings as "stupid as offensive".
| Year | Title | Publisher |
|---|---|---|
| 2021 | Australian Animals | Hardie Grant |
| 2020 | Australian Mammals | Hardie Grant |
| 2019 | Australian Sea Life | Hardie Grant |
| 2018 | Australian Birds | Hardie Grant |
| 2021 | Day Break (with Amy McQuire) | Hardie Grant |
| 2024 | Pull It Down | Slingshot Books |
| 2024 | The Pull It Down Reader (with James Tylor) | Slingshot Books |
| 2021 | Do You Ever Wonder? | Decapod Press |
| 2026 | Bila: A River Cycle (written by Jazz Money) | University of Queensland Press (cancelled) |
{{cite magazine}}: CS1 maint: others (link) CS1 maint: periodical has ISBN (link) Description: 31 pages; illustrations; 38 cm.{{cite magazine}}: CS1 maint: others (link) CS1 maint: periodical has ISBN (link) Description: 31 pages; illustrations; 38 cm. Cover: Palestinian red triangle.{{cite magazine}}: CS1 maint: others (link) CS1 maint: periodical has ISBN (link) Description: 43 pages; illustrations; 38 cm.{{cite magazine}}: CS1 maint: others (link)Chun – whose real name is Matthew Jones – published an op-ed... "We don't mourn fascists" refers to Chabad as a "Zionist Jewish-supremacist organization" that holds "events to advance settler-colonization in Palestine amidst the ongoing extermination of Gaza". Chun justified the killing of slain Rabbi Eli Schlanger on account of him visiting the West Bank, fundraising for the IDF, and signing Gaza-bound missiles.
The Weekend Australian revealed on Friday how Chun was a key figure in the widespread dissemination of the documents... His real name is Matt Jones, a NSW South Coast local who used to own a cafe...
Chun – whose real name is Matthew Jones – simply doubled down on his rhetoric.
Chun, real name Matthew Jones, did not respond to requests for comment.
The Sunday Paper is an anti-imperialist print periodical and podcast. The most recent issue "The Pitfalls of Liberalism" includes a piece by one of our co-founders. The Sunday Paper was born during the popular uprisings of May 2021 as an art project and an act of protest. Specifically, it was created in opposition to Zionist-owned Schwartz Media, a company that has for years monopolised 'progressive' media, weaponising its power and influence to suffocate criticism of the Zionist entity.
One example of this is The Sunday Paper; an independent publication that was created in the boycott of an anti-Palestinian media outlet, Schwartz Media. The Sunday Paper centres the voices of Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, and Palestinian people and their allies, working together in solidarity and uncompromising love to resist settler-colonial occupation.
...host Keiran Stewart-Assheton is joined by Mell Chun, audio producer and reporter for The Sunday Paper.
The owner of Mister Jones cafe, Matt Chun, received threats of 'vandalism, arson, murder, mass violence' over his 'lighthearted' Australia Day sign
In a letter to UQP, published by Lamestream, Abdel-Fattah described the decision not to publish Bila as "shameful and cowardly" and suggested the swift reaction from authors could have been predicted, following the events at AWW and a similar author boycott at Bendigo Writers Festival.... She said the writing community and broader public could "see through the weaponisation of accusations of anti-Semitism to censor and punish voices that denounce and oppose [Israel]".
Bila: A River Cycle by Wiradjuri poet Jazz Money, illustrated by Matt Chun.
Summary: Annotation. A project confronting settler-colonialism, centering Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, and Palestinian experiences in solidarity".
{{citation}}: CS1 maint: others (link){{cite web}}: CS1 maint: others (link){{cite web}}: CS1 maint: others (link)Commissioning editor: Keiran Stewart-Assheton; Writing: Gurrnoong (Jasper Cohen-Hunter); Steve Salaita; Mell Chun; Derek La Salle; Nita and Jesse Okoko; Tara Alami and Yazan Zahzah for Palestinian Feminist Collective; Elsa Tuet-Rosenberg, Shoshana Rosenberg, and Alana Lentin; Sui Zhen; Drawing: Aliaa Betawi; Yugaamgan (Em Randall); Photography: Ala Kheir. Photography, Gudjerron Club, and pull-out poster artwork: James Tylor; Art object: Clement
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: others (link)