Island 169

Island’s long, rich history and the legacy of its previous editors are at my shoulder as I send this, my first issue as Managing Editor, to print. Hundreds of hopeful writers submit to every issue of Island but there is space for only a handful in the magazine. As outgoing Nonfiction Editor Anna-Spargo Ryan says, the ones you read here are the ones that set us alight; the ‘rare and rich treasures ... that can speak of this moment’ (thank you, Judith Abell). This is Australia thinking about how colonialism plays out here and abroad, about past and future bushfires, about safety and bravery, about today’s children and the world they’ll grow up in. All of it is about why words matter, about why literature matters, about how we imagine and change the world through writing and storytelling. Thank you to everyone who offered us your work, and thank you for reading.

— Jane Rawson, Managing Editor

What a pleasure to work on the pieces for this, my last issue as Nonfiction Editor at Island Magazine. I’m a writer, so my instinct is to make this all about me, but before I do I must tell you about what you’ll find in these pages. I gasped when I started reading Tehnuka’s ‘Gifts from a Harsh Continent’; a Tamil woman volcanologist writing about Antarctica? Hook it up to my veins. Then, I came upon Tim Loveday’s ‘To Call the Dogs’ and felt a pang of insufficiency for the creatures who love us unconditionally. I was entranced by Darby Jones’s agonised remembering, and the extraordinary quiet–loudness of his voice. And I was confronted by Ben Walter’s writing – in the spirit of another great Tasmanian (Richard Flanagan) – about the wilful complacency and harm of flathead fisheries.

I guess I did make that all about me after all. I trust you will have a similar reaction to these pieces.

My first task at Island was to articulate what I was looking for in submissions, and in the four-ish years since, it has never changed: I want to read about whatever sets you alight. History. Science. Inequity. Rage. The tiny, splayed feet of geckos. This guideline was the greatest gift I could have given myself: I could click on literally anything and find an interesting story, often about a topic brand new to me.

I’m especially pleased to have been part of launching the Island Nonfiction Prize, and to have had some of my heroes to judge alongside me. The three winners – Megan Clement, Heather Taylor Johnson and Indigo Bailey – wrote some of the most beautiful sentences I’ve ever read, anywhere.

Finally, Island published a couple of my pieces early in my career, and I’m proud to have published many early- career writers in turn. It’s the greatest privilege of an editor to contribute something to the shape of a writer while at their most malleable – to have shared any kind of lesson, to have offered even the most minutely memorable insight that might be folded into a future literary voice. I’m sure that whoever is lucky enough to follow after me in this role will do the same – to try to elevate and make space and discover – and the power of the continuous renewal of words will continue.

— Anna Spargo-Ryan, Nonfiction Editor

This is my first outing as Fiction Editor and it’s been a genuine delight; I’ve loved reading submissions and picking out the connections among them. At first I thought the stories I’d chosen were all linked by the theme of looming outside threat, which was quite appropriate. As we worked on them, though, I suddenly realised that what I was seeing wasn’t about the outside threat itself, but protection from it. In Andrew Roff’s witty and assured ‘Airtight’, a Hollywood director shows the world his soul – and keeps it safe – through his post-apocalyptic blockbuster, and in Valerie Ng’s sweetly strange ‘Please Wake Up’, an ambiguous loved one appears in dreams with a message of longing. Kristian Olesen navigates us through a safe haven and beyond into disaster, or not, in the frightening and hopeful ‘The Thermonauts’, while in ‘Birdhouse’, Annie Zhang’s songlike story of a mother and her child asks if we even have the right to offer protection at all.

— Kate Kruimink, Fiction Editor

I like the way poems can examine many different kinds of encounter – small talk on a plane (Williams), an email from a brother (Thomas), a walk with a poet along the jetty (Beveridge), talking a child to sleep with the soft endearment – ‘small plum’ – of lullaby (Lim), or the departing shadow of a fox (Morley) – and turn those often-fleeting meetings into something lapidary. A memorable phrase can colour our own encounters for years to come.

I like too the way a poem can haunt different moments as much as those moments haunt us. Poems show us ‘The sky / full of omens’ (Chong), and the way ‘two spectral figures loom’ from the riverbank (Owens), contemplate ‘God watching the CCTV’ (Powell) and recognises the sounds of ‘the death-secrets/ of a Chinese family drip/ into a bucket of rain’ (Zhan). Moments that first strike the poet become moments that strike me, experiencing them through the poem. We remember again how in a poem ‘Desire pangs’ (Lune) and we keep up ‘this ancient practice of keeping words alive’ (Magee).

— Kate Middleton, Poetry Editor

The abiding curatorial lens I apply to Island is one of an archivist. What rare and rich treasures will we store here that can speak of this moment? In this archive/issue, there is a short piece on Jonny Scholes’s work Interpreted, reflecting the way artists (of course!) are delving into the possibilities of artificial intelligence while others decry this latest revolution as evidence the end is nigh. Niki Bañados’s piece – our last of The Nanna Project – speaks of the expansive and painful feelings of a parent in a time of such environmental uncertainty. Josh Santospirito rattles the literary cage, asking ‘What about the written image?’ And Ricky Maynard’s heart-rending work, photographed 30 years ago but still ringing true, shows us why change is needed in this country in terms of a First Nations voice.

— Judith Abell, Arts Features Editor