Island 171

What is the point of reading and writing? What I hope is that imagination – nourished and tempered by attention and practice – helps us conceptualise different futures. Faced with a rapidly worsening climate, with the horrors inflicted in Palestine, perhaps imagination can be the antidote to ‘there’s no point trying to change anything; I’m powerless; this is the way it’s always been’. Tasmania and Australia are in a time of great change. We can wish things were how they used to be, we can be dragged along into whatever larger forces want for us, or we can come up with our own plans. Literature and arts help us say the things we’re not hearing, stretch and shift our minds, find companionship and care. But they can also be exclusionary – for people who struggle with reading or who don’t see a place for themselves among writers. Our graphic narratives project was a step towards being more inclusive; in this issue we immerse ourselves in different languages, different experiences of reading, and a fruitful blurriness between image and text. And on Island Online, we are dipping our toes into audio. I hope you find something to expand your mind and your world.

— Jane Rawson, Managing Editor

Just before the entries were consolidated for this year’s Nonfiction Prize, Jane, our Managing Editor, posed a question to me. What even is nonfiction? I knew the remark was meant as a joke, but it still gave me pause. As Nonfiction Editor, there should be every expectation that I know the answer to that question but the truth is, I find the genre so slippery, so hard to pin down, that I often struggle to define it. I think that’s mostly because it purports to offer something entirely ambiguous: truth. For me, the question has always been: What even is truth?

This year’s entries demonstrated in a myriad of ways the vibrancy of the contemporary nonfiction landscape. We were blown away by the breadth of themes, the research undertaken, the care with narrative, voice and structure, and the innumerable ways that writers are now testing the form itself.

We saw traditional essay styles, but also pieces that broke the mould, that used language in novel ways to describe what might otherwise be indescribable. There were pieces that made us laugh out loud and others that made us weep. Some horrified, and others angered. Maybe that’s where truth comes into the picture – when the reader can’t avoid the wash of feeling offered by the work. Maybe that affective response is the moment of truth.

I was joined on the judging panel this year by Erin Riley and Daniel Nour, two writers I admire for their acute, informed, often comical, and always deeply felt observations of the world. Using their positionality as a vantage, they have brought utterly unique voices to Australia’s literary scene, so I knew their insights would be invaluable. I have to thank them for bringing a huge amount of care and investment to what was a really tough task.

Our shortlistees this year are Suri Matondkar, Jenny Sinclair, Gan Ainm and Jessica White. Thematically, their pieces could not be more different, but where they meet is in their courage, generosity and startling use of language and description, along with their capacity to critique the dominant systems within which we exist. In Writing Task 1, Suri Matondkar uses institutional semantics to reveal the unwieldy, extortionary and often imbalanced experiences of international students in Australia. The writing moves unapologetically between English and Hindi – you’ll know the piece is working its magic when you have trouble keeping up. Jenny Sinclair takes us below the surface in seeing Ningaloo. This is nature writing at its finest. While the descriptions are poetic and moving, and the scenes keenly observed, Sinclair’s work aptly troubles the colonial, consumerist leanings of nature tourism. Her awe-filled uncertainty is a joy to read. In A story-shaped life, Gan Ainm walks us, at times breathlessly, through the experience of bipolar disorder when treatment is unavailable. It’s a masterclass in pacing, and an example of true literary daring. And Jessica White shares a no-holds-barred depiction of loss, love and the experience of disability in an ableist system in The breath goes now. It offers a bit of everything. We recommend having tissues on hand.

This year’s winner of the nonfiction prize is Cherry Zheng for their artful, strident essay, Fucking with Chineseness. In this piece, the author challenges us to understand cultural belonging in new ways, subverting the paradigm of the ‘good migrant’ with wry humour and a touching longing to understand and be understood. The narrative of not quite fitting in, of the desire to bridge cultural gaps that comes from cultural dislocation, speaks to a universal theme of feeling othered, outcast, culturally nowhere, lost in many places. Zheng’s writing is laced with empathy, curiosity, and delightful scepticism as it interrogates systems and ideas around identity and positioning.

Congratulations, Cherry! Your piece is a deserving winner of this year’s Island Nonfiction Prize.

We are extremely grateful to be supported in this prize by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

— Keely Jobe, Nonfiction Editor

I’m excited about the stories featured in this issue. I’m also humbled by their authors' skill. They are a resonant whole, with themes of grief and love and change speaking to one another. At the same time, each is quite distinct. I was delighted to be able to choose a graphic story for this issue in the gorgeous and obscure First breath by Nilufar Shah. I was also thrilled by the successful experiments of Katherine Nicholson's intuitive You I mourn like plants mourn their roots and Miriam Webster’s rhythmic, witty For want of natural snow. Meanwhile, Melanie Saward’s tender, sad – and sexy – Milk tea tells a profound story through deceptively small moments, and Daniel Ray’s Any other substance balances gentle sadness with sharp wit.

— Kate Kruimink, Fiction Editor

Ritual is a home in these poems, whether it is the ritual of housecleaning ‘every second Sunday’ (Cheng) or the recognition of hymns as a ‘comfortable/ architecture’ (Jones). Ritual, like Izzy Roberts-Orr's swimming pool, holds us ‘weightless as a thought’. The regular beat of a skipping rope becomes music, coffee drinkers meet their regular waitresses with a ‘tip jar’ of ‘baby talk’ (Slade). Amid repetition there is transformation: the page becomes ‘vegetal’ (Elvey), while the ‘nonsense’ of campaigning gives way to the language of governance (Ferney). And the poet speaks to other poets: Petra White recalls Coleridge’s address to his son; Steve Brock reads James Schuyler and carries his words into the city. Mikaela Nyman attends to ‘Rilke’s bell tower’. So too, through poems, do I connect with and reconfigure my sense of the world. Adrienne Eberhard sees the steep drop of the escarpment in relation to the body: its fissure is a ‘lifeline’, a set of ‘capillaries’, changing my own vision of the landscape. Yet even as we turn toward the world with new eyes, John Kinsella reminds us that for its inhabitants, ‘I am a self they cannot know’ – and that in that not-knowing, there is wonder.

— Kate Middleton, Poetry Editor

Artists create in order to represent, to explore ideas, to understand, and sometimes to heal rends in the fabric of their worlds. Art’s great power and paradox is that it is often a hypothetical exercise with a real outcome. Emma Bugg isn’t actually bringing the thylacine back to life within her carefully crafted locket, but the work she has completed calls the animal and its stories back into the room. Amber Koroluk-Stephenson does not paint anything that directly represents the themes of womanhood that she explores, yet she builds tangible worlds in which those ideas swim – within the painting and the eye of the viewer. And the swarm of artists who have engaged with the unique conditions of Queenstown and Tasmania’s West Coast over the last few decades have not expected to transform the place. They have visited and documented, been inspired and created. A few, like Raymond Arnold and Helena Demczuk have stayed. Travis Tiddy built a festival to celebrate his home town. Each artistic offering is small, yet the place has changed and it could be argued that the arts are quietly leading that region from a place of material taking to a place of material giving.

— Judith Abell, Arts Features Editor