Island 168

In this issue, we’re thrilled to present the shortlisted and winning essays from this year’s Island Nonfiction Prize. It’s particularly exciting to us as a Tasmania-based organisation that our winner, Indigo Bailey, is a young Tasmanian writer, selected from a very high-quality national field of entries. Another new Tasmanian writer, Elsie Auckland, takes to the page in our ‘Island Conversations’ project, responding to a poem by Gwen Harwood. 

This issue also includes a double-length feature on TWIST, a new exhibition responding to the literary work, life and influences of Charles Dickens, and another comic/graphic narrative as part of a year-long project curated by Joshua Santospirito, in which Luke and Kelly Jackson and Thơm Nguyen explore the pain of estrangement. 

We hope you enjoy the selection of short stories in this issue, which cleverly analyse and critique Australia’s social structures – or, as in Hei Gou’s ‘The End of the Dream’, brilliantly build an entirely different country in response to another icon of the literary canon (Tolkien). As usual, the issue is enriched by 10 fabulous poems that relish the tricks within language that turn speech into song, and the opportunities forms offer for play and connection. Enjoy.

— Vern Field, Managing Editor

Island Nonfiction Prize Judges’ Report

I didn’t know quite what we were looking for in this year’s competition. We started in 2021, deep in pandemic panic, when many of us could only think of one thing and imagine one kind of future. This year, we have a smorgasbord of options when it comes to being furious, agitated or – less obviously – optimistic. In last year’s judges’ report, I wrote about the many other critical issues we had to cover, from climate change and deforestation to war and displacement.

What we didn’t see was a search for comfort. In the 2023 entries, a strong theme emerged of compounding tiredness, accompanied by a need to find a place to rest, whether literal or figurative. Weariness makes it hard to act but writing can be both momentum and a balm, if executed well.

This year’s winner, ‘Rain Rain’ by Tasmanian writer Indigo Bailey, does this exactly. It’s a hunger for peace – Bailey starts out by using rain sound generators as a soothing mechanism – but it’s also a smart, multimodal analysis of how it works. Why is that ‘rain on a tin roof’ ambience so reassuring? Why do we yearn for the mundane? They’re questions close to my heart: I also use rain sounds as a way to drown out thoughts of the impending global devastation to catch a few hours of sleep. ‘This is the summer when fires rage across the Bass Strait,’ she writes. ‘Your dad raps the water tank with his knuckles and it’s a husk. And, in your room, it rains.’

Extraordinary writers and critics Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen and Fiona Wright were my fellow judges for this year’s prize, and I’m grateful for their incisive thoughts about the many gorgeous entries we were lucky to read. While Bailey’s essay stood out as our unanimous winner, we’re thrilled with the shortlist and I’m proud to publish it in its entirety.

Alongside ‘Rain Rain’ in this issue, you’ll find ‘Clothing the Whiteness’, Isabella Wang’s contrasting of her mother’s aspirations for high fashion and the lives destroyed by fashion supply chains, drawing on her own heritage and her mother’s immigrant experiences. ‘Collection of Collections’, by Meredith Jelbart, is a lush journey through rooms and rooms of curiosities, and a reflection on what they give to us as humans with a need to find meaning. In ‘The Other Hand’, Carly Stone fearlessly tackles poetic fragmentation to look for love, or something like it. ‘We Were Here’ is our first graphic shortlistee, with Sarah Firth’s incredible art sitting in conversation with Jelbart, in a beautiful attempt to figure out what our stuff means: ‘Photography converts the whole world into a cemetery.’

I hope you find these pieces as remarkable as we did. Every year I think I know what to expect from the entries, and every year I am bewildered in the best way.

With gratitude to the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund for supporting this prize.

— Anna Spargo-Ryan, Nonfiction Editor

There’s a lot of gnawing anxiety around at the moment: trying to find a place to rent, the money for bills, a job that will pay your swelling mortgage without destroying your soul. This issue’s authors have distilled that feeling. In Zowie Douglas-Kinghorn’s ‘Night Shift’ and Kelly Bartholomeusz’s ‘Swimming Lessons’, work is precarious and demeaning at one end of your life, while loneliness haunts the other. These authors find beauty despite it all. In Jessica Tuckwell’s ‘Summoned’, using the right serum and the perfect tone of voice is a matter of life and death, while in RT Wenzel’s ‘Salmon-Eater’, a fisherman’s lonely struggle against the destruction of Tasmania’s waterways threatens to drown him in sashimi. All of these stories do a brilliant job analysing and critiquing Australia’s social structures; Hei Gou’s ‘The End of the Dream’ brilliantly builds an entirely different country. 

— Jane Rawson, Fiction Editor

I love how the poems in this issue locate us: each speaks to place and experience, whether directly or from a wry angle. Each relishes the tricks within language that turn speech into song, and the opportunities forms offer for play and connection. In Scott-Patrick Mitchell’s glossary, the rich language of botany is applied to queer desire. In Svetlana Sterlin’s poem, movement becomes language, while Graeme Miles takes us into the tide’s constant motion. Jennifer Compton and Willo Drummond bring the domestic into view, offering revelation. Suzi Mezei uses white space to bring air to weathers. Amy Crutchfield’s pantoum tightens its grip as it proceeds, demanding another stanza to follow. Stuart Barnes offers a tour-de-force answer to Marianne Moore’s intricate forms. Sometimes it’s the statements that stick: from Isi Unikowski’s ‘Mothers never fare well in these stories’, to Michael Farrell’s startling and memorable ‘Walking is the best way to transport a pair of shoes’. It’s a line that now accompanies my days.

— Kate Middleton, Poetry Editor

While our two arts features in this issue may seem like night and day, they are linked by the forms they fuse. Each is a union of literature and arts, making them essential for inclusion in Island, a publication also perched at this nexus. This issue continues our series of comic/graphic narrative works, a year-long project curated by Joshua Santospirito, with the overarching theme ‘The Nanna’. ‘The Deep Freeze’, written by Luke and Kelly Jackson, and illustrated by Thơm Nguyen, tells an all-too-familiar tale about the secret pain of estrangement. The work reflects how many of us battle with fractures in our closest relationships, often alone and in shame. In this issue, we have dedicated a double-length feature to the newest exhibition at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG), entitled TWIST. This significant show, passionately and skilfully curated by Mary Knights, is a response to the literary work, life and influences of Charles Dickens. An essay by Maria Kunda weaves together his literary themes, the responses of contemporary artists within the show, and the very nature of TMAG, having been founded in the same era that Dickens was writing his best-known works.

— Judith Abell, Arts Features Editor