Island 163
There are so many ideas in this issue that have moved me, gnawed at me and floated around in my head for the many months we’ve worked to bring these writings and artworks to you. At the time of going to print, COP26 was only a week away, so it seemed fitting to begin this issue with Harriet Riley’s ‘Climate Girls’ and an image of Bristol’s massive mural of perhaps the most outspoken one. (If you haven’t heard Greta Thunberg’s ‘blah blah blah’ speech, do look it up.) It struck me how often climate impacts loomed in this issue, whether front and centre as in Harriet Riley’s and Joan Fleming’s essays, or as a malevolent force in the background – from Ivy Ireland’s dying trees and struggling nasturtiums to Claire Corbett’s experience of being far from home in a wintry Europe while bushfire raged in New South Wales. The term ‘apocalypse’ rolls off the tongue so regularly now, but the word has a broad meaning: catastrophic destruction, disaster and endings, yes, but also revelation, disclosure, discovery. This issue covers the spectrum of ‘the various apocalypses of a life’ – tragedy, loss, illness, but also strange visions, transformations, uncertainty and the connecting power of love.
For this issue, we’re pleased to have partnered again with South East Arts on the Olga Masters Short Story Award and with TasWriters on the Emerging Tasmanian Aboriginal Writers Award – and of course with our design partner, Futago. This is Futago’s 21st issue, and the team is instrumental in making each issue of Island a visual treat.
In breaking news as we go to print, we’re grateful to have secured funding from Arts Tasmania for 2022 – so we look forward to bringing you more in print and online throughout the year. Also watch out for the pieces that will emerge online from the first cycle of our nature writing project and sign up to our newsletter to hear about the next two cycles.
As always, I hope you’ll find hours of interest, pleasure and challenge in Island 163.
— Vern Field, Managing Editor
The arts features in this issue respond to the kinds of ideas and images that roll around at the edges of our minds, often inexplicable, sometimes troubling, sometimes soothing and always psychologically sticky. This is the interesting thing about artists of all kinds. There are swathes of professional people out there who work only with what they know, what they can understand, what they can measure or categorically describe. Artists, on the other hand, are happy to explore what they don’t know, what they don’t necessarily understand, what they might not have the words for. In his feature, ‘Secret Beach’, graphic novelist Leigh Rigozzi speaks of the kinds of landscapes that are solidly embedded in our minds as part of who we are and our upbringing. Even a whole lifetime of familiarity doesn’t remove the questions around these places, particularly in Tasmania, where the knowledge of tens of thousands of years of occupation has been lost. Michaye Boulter also dwells in landscapes she has deep familiarity with in her series entitled What Stays Within. In conversation with Heather Rose, she suggests that in many ways these images come from looking inward rather than out. And Pat Brassington’s renowned work, revealed here through her discussion with writer Andrew Harper, is even more difficult to describe, with the artist seeing herself as a kind of ‘excavator’ of imagery, via a gradual process of visual exploration and revelation.
— Judith Abell, Arts Features Editor
Lately I find myself thinking, with this issue’s poems, of houses and what inhabits them or has ceased to inhabit them, of what we possess, and are possessed by. By invoking, ‘the human I live with’, Kristen Lang implicitly acknowledges the non-human presences with which we all reside. Tracy Ryan considers kitsch ‘oddities so everyday/ I can conjure them up at once’, reminding us of the animation we invest in the objects with which we surround ourselves. When Judith Beveridge’s attention is drawn to ‘an octopus flexible and as pale/ as a ballet slipper’, that moment’s attention is stretched: ‘I do not yet know how often this memory/ will recur’. The recurrence of memory is another form of habitation, as is the care of attention, as when Jane Gibian notes that ‘The sun has moved to the left/ corner of the blue spotted towel’. It is in these memories and observations that ‘joy takes up space’ (Petra White), even though when an inhabitant leaves, we may note ‘The disinherited house not missing him’ (Derek Wright). And it is in this way that subjects, selves, homes, worlds are brought into relation that makes me think, with Paul Magee, that ‘what surrounds us has no roots, but everywhere’.
— Kate Middleton, Poetry Editor
I always find it difficult in these brief editorial notes to talk about the stories individually, because how much can you say about a complex work of short fiction in a line or two? Doubly so in an issue like this one. I’m thrilled that we’re squeezing seven pieces into its pages, including Ivy Ireland’s fabulous winning entry from the Olga Masters Short Story Award. But still, we should celebrate the diversity of these wonderful stories – from Will Cox’s strange tale of transformation to Margaret Hickey’s poignant (and funny) account of roads not taken; from Cameron Stewart’s assured prose to Mark Smith’s devastating ending; from Georgia Brough’s eerie room underground to SJ Finn’s compelling neighbourly conflict – it’s so exciting to see the various forms that Australian short fiction can take, and how our writers continue to embrace its possibilities. I hope you enjoy these stories as much as I did.
— Ben Walter, Fiction & Online Editor
Isn’t it a funny world? All these disparate issues with which we concern ourselves – whether through necessity or fixation or desire – that circle back again and again to the same centrality. Each of the nonfiction pieces in this issue addresses both a discomfort and a longing for comfort, seeking relief from certain doom, from grief, from insurmountable chaos. While I was editing these pieces, Melbourne came out of lockdown for a sixth ‘and final’ (famous last words?) time and the mood was something the same: a blinking, bewildered need to find normality and cling to it, knowing there is only ever a different kind of change.