Island 165
This issue includes the winning and shortlisted entries from this year’s Island Nonfiction Prize. These essays thoughtfully explore our relationships with art, illness, sexuality and nature in compelling and beautiful writing.
Island 165 is also packed with excellent new poetry and fiction that will startle, captivate, inspire and move you. You’ll even be intrigued by a story told through receipts, internet searches and playlists!
Along with features on three wonderful painters, we bring you a taste of a large, timely artistic project: water[shed], in which 50 artists respond to the 50th anniversary of the inundation of Tasmania’s jewel-like original Lake Pedder. Enjoy
— Vern Field, Managing Editor
Island Nonfiction Prize 2022 - Judges’ Report
In my time as Nonfiction Editor and as a teacher, I’ve learned that reading nonfiction submissions offers a wonderful, surprising and often confronting insight into what’s on the public’s mind. The inaugural Island Nonfiction Prize, won by Megan Clement, drew entries on a certain theme. As you might expect, at the peak of a pandemic, writers were concerned with family connection, inequality, death and displacement.
This year’s submissions were quite different. Although Covid is far from over (wear a mask!), the urgency of the conversation seems to have shifted. Living in a pandemic is, according to these entries, no longer so novel (no pun intended) as to warrant its own essays.
Which is just as well, because don’t we have some other critical issues to cover? In 2022, we had a clear theme of destablisation. Many of these stories were told through a personal lens – an experience of climate change, displacement, unrest, hatred, fear – but they largely spoke to a world in broad turmoil. Writers are furious, demanding change in increasingly strong voices. It was both enriching and confronting to read these entries.
The wonderful Lur Alghurabi and Rick Morton brought their own generosity to the judging process. We struggled to narrow this list from hundreds of entries, and, look, we had some tiny judge fights. The quality of the work being submitted was extraordinary, and I’m grateful to everyone who sent in their words.
Shortlisted this year were four exceptional essays, wide-ranging in their style and subject. Chris Fleming explores mental illness in the best way – with humour and openness – in ‘Sudden, Temporary Deaths’. In ‘Chaste’, Suri Matondkar charges furiously through the impact of culture on sexuality and desire. We have Emily Mowat’s report ‘Wingsets and Snowdrifts’, from her time as a field biologist on subantarctic Macquarie Island, accompanied by her striking photography. And Jo Gardiner will break your heart wide open with ‘The Long Daylight’, a poetic reflection on loss.
I’m overjoyed with our winning piece, by Heather Taylor-Johnson. ‘Selfish Ghosts’ felt incredibly timely to me, and in a meta way I’m probably about to do exactly what it critiques, which is to impose ourselves on the art that sustains us. Part criticism, part personal essay, this stunning work considers the consumer as a selfish ghost, taking and taking from the output of others to soothe and satisfy our own discomfort. Taylor-Johnson writes, ‘Possibly I’ve completely missed the point of art. I don’t sit with it as if it were a mountain but as if it were a mirror.’ In this winning essay, she invites us to do the same.
I hope you love these pieces as much as we did. Thank you, once again, to all who backed themselves and entered – I wish you so much success and joy in your writing.
With gratitude to the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund for supporting this prize.
— Anna Spargo-Ryan, Nonfiction Editor
The beauty of writing short stories is that you can play in all sorts of sandpits, spending a few thousand words making up a world that is miserable, or hilarious, or bizarre, then finishing up with it and writing another one. The words stay shiny and there’s not as much time to get sick of them. The beauty of bringing these stories to readers is similar. The pieces in this issue by Adam Ouston, Bill Morton, Hei Gou, Sebastian Gonzalez Barlia, Laura Elvery and Elizabeth Allen are a series of captivating fictions that are utterly different and distinct. Their authors highlight the enormous possibilities of the form – the writing moves from elegant realism through to formal experimentation and wild invention – and I’m thrilled that we get to share in their fun.
— Ben Walter, Fiction Editor
Commended in this year’s Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, Kay Are’s poem begins ‘I was before a window at a desk, I was a body at a desk before a window’, remembering to locate being inside the body. Roland Leach’s ‘Approaching Zero,’ also commended, uses the materials of the body to calculate the cost of human history. Both poems are startling. So too, the other poems in this issue contain moments that startle, whether on the surface (Shastra Deo reveals ‘the younger sister’s husband waits/ out the full moon because he is a werewolf. Surprise!’) or arriving more quietly (as in Geoff Page’s portrait of Lake Burley Griffin during lockdown: ‘You contemplate your demographic/ and thus your pair of lungs’). A poet starts us ‘racing around’, a lipstick colour is discontinued, there is ‘a pause in night/ traffic’, the things we ‘always say’ take on new meaning, or our own roles change because ‘It’s hard to stay a daughter once you’ve turned into a mother’. Meanwhile the earth takes account of ‘this plastic eternity’.
— Kate Middleton, Poetry Editor
Art explores external states – landscape, the figure, the built – but also our inner states of mind or our response to context. And this exploration can be a way of processing life, current issues, personal circumstances. The arts features in this issue are all the work of fantastic female painters: two based in Tasmania, and the other having studied here but now Melbourne-based. In their own ways, they are each using their chosen medium, paint, to massage ideas. Jo Chew considers the home – hers, her relatives’, the fragility of this for many – in a body of work that forms the culmination of her PhD study. Celeste Chandler, having had to give up her studio during COVID lockdowns, and dealing with recovery from major surgery, has turned her focus inwards to her immediate interior and exterior environment, feeling some affinity with local homes under renovation, their pieces stripped down and put back together. Megan Walch has let an exploratory, fantastical body work of work about UFOs be the vessel to carry her through a difficult period of cancer treatment, seeing it as the perfect moment to make ‘whatever the f#%k you want’.