Richard Rossiter

As one who has lived in Western Australia for the greater part of her life and currently works in the arts,  my interest was piqued by the claim of the editors of his collection that Western Australia may bid farewell to the defensive term ‘Cinderella State’, once adopted in relation to its arts and culture. Traditionally perceived in the cultural imagination as ‘behind’ its east coast counterparts, Western Australia has struggled with the entrenched perceptions of many in eastern cultural centres: an edenic state with its beach culture, sun and outdoor lifestyle, somehow not quite in step with the rest of the country, and possessing a slight but discernible cultural ineptitude. As one contributor to this collection states, Western Australia has been viewed as ‘an isolated enclave sitting on the edge of a void’; insularity and parochialism have regularly been invoked when describing the most remote city in the world.

This is both an exciting and a sad collection. Kenneth Mackenzie, like those later Western Australian writers Randolph Stow and Tim Winton (and, I might add, Griffith Watkins), first appeared in print with work composed at a remarkably young age and which was extraordinary in its poetic intensity and command of language. And like Stow and Watkins (but not, fortunately, like Winton) the early achievement was matched only in fits and starts by the later work. Griffith Watkins committed suicide in his thirties, Randolph Stow has been beset by long periods of silence, and Kenneth Mackenzie drowned in a river near Goulburn, aged forty-one. He had become an alcoholic.