Island 172
This issue of Island contains contributions from First Nations creators across visual art (Rex Greeno), poetry (Yasmin Smith) and nonfiction (Paul Collis and Paul Magee’s collaborative work with Wayne Applebee and Brian Smith, among others), and I am delighted that we can also feature the work of Dharug writer and artist Jennifer Evans, winner of the 2022 Tasmanian Literary Awards Aboriginal Writer’s Fellowship. Jennifer has taken two different perspectives on a story of colonisation in ‘Yudi mirrung walama, coming home’ and ‘BlaQ storywork’. Island feels, to me, immensely richer thanks to all of these contributions and I am grateful to their creators for sharing them with us.
As always, the magazine is chock full of poetry, stories and essays, but this isn't the only place where we publish brand-new writing. Every week we post a poem, story or essay to Island Online - if you haven't already read 'Dhanggal Bawagal: Mussel Sisters', 'Masters', or Bobby K's poem '1', I recommend you rush on over. Island Online is free to read, and regularly open to submissions.
Next year we’ll be delivering four issues of Island magazine rather than three, with some exciting new features. Sadly, we’ll be doing it without Arts Features Editor Judith Abell, whose last issue this is. Jude has been a mainstay of the magazine for years, a staunch voice for Tasmania’s visual artists, and a magnificent collaborator in the project of bringing more graphic narratives to Island’s pages. Thank you, Jude: you’ll be hard to replace.
— Jane Rawson, Managing Editor
This issue I had the great joy of working with emerging writer and editor, UTAS intern Meisha Simpson, in selecting our pieces. Thanks for your insight and care, Meisha. You’ve got an eye for exceptional writing. The pieces we have chosen are manifestly existential in content. They depict instants of loneliness, injustice, social invisibility, guilt, mortality and survival, but there are also shining moments of hope – something we need more of – and the kind of ambling pace that can act as a balm in a chaotic world. In Not choosing, Erin Riley goes on a self-imposed writing retreat and confronts some inhibiting people-pleasing tendencies. With a distinctly soothing rhythm, Riley shows us
that writing retreats are very often not about writing at all. Kylie Mulcahey’s How to build a sandcastle looks at the child protection system in Tasmania via the experience of a social worker and one of her long-terms clients. Mulcahey’s deeply informed and sympathetic gaze reveals a system lacking in nuance, funding and justice for both children and parents. Bridget Webster’s The price of loneliness describes in strange and haunting prose the author’s experience as an intern in Japan. Webster depicts a larger epidemic of social isolation, even as she combats her own with overconsumption. In Memento mori, Verity Borthwick goes underground and comes face-to-face with her own mortality. And finally, we accompany Paul Collis and Paul Magee as they take us around Barkindji country/Bourke in Stories in paintings and letters. Their walking dialogue, accompanied by stunning photography, offers an in-situ narrative of place and history built as a collaboration with locals they talk to along the way. Throughout, the ongoing significance of art and storytelling to cultural survival is made clear.
— Keely Jobe, Nonfiction Editor
This issue, I was joined by our first fiction intern, Abby Otten from UTAS, and it was a real source of richness and inquiry to work with her on selecting this round. The stories in this ssue speak to each other through time, offering the suggestion of sequels and prequels and ‘meanwhile…’. They exchange strange, curling language about death and new growth, about apocalypse and what comes after. In Saraid Taylor’s The storing, the narrator claims a place in memory and space among creatures that ‘click their teeth happily’, and in Claire Aman’s Ishbel, the narrator carries her memories with her, pacing and pacing up and down her brother’s street in the company of a whippet. In Pip Jones’ False Autumn, climate apocalypse looms as rain moths die confusedly and a couple search for mushrooms among pine needles that smell like a ‘detritivore hymn’. Gilgamesh’s Oracle by Zana Fraillon presents as a possible far-distant sequel, a saga looking back over the millennia to flood warnings plastered over the public toilets. And Meghalee Bose’s Doing good stands watching, outside time, and gives its narrator an opportunity to undo some wrong, and the moral responsibility to undo it correctly – and the most perfect pair of final words.
— Kate Kruimink, Fiction Editor
A simple phrase (as when Derek Wright notes ‘the dither of the aged care home’ or when Simeon Kronenberg states ‘My eyes itch / sleeping’s difficult’) allows the reader to enter the delicate space of the poem – a space built on Brendan Ryan’s ‘cobweb thread of trust’. Upon entry, the senses come fully to life: we see Jo Langdon perceives ‘the spider, the linden / flowers & the tentative light’, Helga Jermy shows us ‘bird tracks in the sky’ and Yasmin Smith hangs sweetsops ‘by the / window’. We smell Suzi Mezei’s ‘scent / of mealy earth rises up’ and hear Verity Oswin’s ‘mud ditty / silt jetties / fish flip’ as language unfolds the world before us. What inflects our language can be humour – it can be Toby Fitch’s ‘Cookie / Monster geode of seeing things on another / plain’ or Troy Wong’s wry observation of what happens ‘When two roads diverge in a dystopian police state’. And what the poem allows us to see can ache with strangeness, as we watch William Fox’s dental surgeon figure ‘how best to trace a maze / of mouth’ and feel the loss of our own milk teeth again, still, as Gurmeet Kaur suggests, ‘tender with noun-memory’.
— Kate Middleton, Poetry Editor
I am non-Palawa, but in my limited understanding an arts practice as a thing in itself is really quite a white concept as the arts are inseparable from any other aspects of Palawa life. Arts is politics is community is life. I begin with this because our features for this issue delve in and around the idea of the fusion between these aspects of human existence. Our feature on Sawtooth ARI offers a tiny window into the twenty-five year history of a small, but mighty artist run organisation (ARI) based in Launceston, supporting the explorations of artists throughout various stages of their careers (and no doubt their lives). Artist quotes, within the piece, reflect their love of the organisation and the centre it has been for their artistic evolution through more than a generation of exhibitions and events. We also feature a small selection from the prolific works of Palawa elder Rex Greeno, who has drawn his whole life, with his representations of remembered, imagined and observed island life offering incredible insight into life for Palawa people from the Furneaux Islands. And equally an observer of his own locale, we feature the work of emerging painter, George Kennedy, who shows us the outer edges of Tasmanian suburbia, its burgeoning development, its social precarity, fragile natural beauty and creeping decay.
It seems entirely appropriate that this offering will be my last with Island magazine. Looking across the features, I have maintained a focus on putting forward emerging artists, increasing the inclusion of Palawa work within the publication and carving out space for reflective writing around the issues presented by and through the lens of the arts. I go out on the inauspicious number of 27 issues, but I have absolutely loved these nearly nine years of using the pages of the magazine as a kind of alternative space for installation, exhibition and thought. As a way to filter a wild array of possible inclusions, I tended to lean on the metaphor of an archive, given the rare, printed nature of Island. I asked, what represents this moment? What is important to capture? What might someone want to look back on, to understand? So it is my hope that this nearly decade-long span is of some value into the future and I look forward to experiencing the next voice in this space.
— Judith Abell, Arts Features Editor