Journals

Elizabeth McMahon is afflicted with the love of islands. In editing this issue of Southerly, her introduction tells us, she wanted to explore our fascination with them, in our imaginations and in our reality as an island continent surrounded by island nations.

And so Griffith Review is ten. It’s a credit to the publishing smarts of founding editor Julianne Schultz that the journal is now a fixture on the cultural landscape, alongside the country’s older literary journals. Griffith is the vantage not of the outraged so much as the frustrated, a reliable forum for passionate criticisms aimed at the inadequacy of political discourse in contemporary Australia. This inadequacy is what Schultz calls the ‘shrill negative timidity and lack of ambition’ in the way political, economic, social, and environmental challenges are framed in public debate. For instance, in one of the liveliest pieces in this issue, Melissa Lucashenko rails against the stereotyping of our urban poor. She writes this as one herself now living in cheap housing in Logan City, Brisbane, one of Australia’s ten poorest urban areas. Quoting Orwell, she finds a kind of relief, being at last genuinely ‘down and out’. It gives her a more nuanced, compassionate perspective – the desideratum of all Griffith contributors – on debates around housing, drugs, and domestic violence.

The Kantian epigraph to this issue of Island points to an exploration of the island as ‘the land of truth’, with the ocean around it as ‘the native home of illusion’. In this way, the translation of experience, both real and imagined, is navigated in clever and topical ways. The emphasis on ‘island’ as a micro-metonym for Tasmania demonstrates that while there are changes afoot at Island, the new editors, Matthew Lamb and Rachel Edwards, have remained steadfastly loyal to its ‘Tasmanian-ness’. Issue 132 showcases the new A4 format. The content is as rigorous and engaging as ever, but the design and layout have more in common with the sinking Cartela on its cover. While the larger format has increased the content, it is at the cost of a rather gauche and cheap-looking publication. (Indeed, pages are falling out of my copy.) Tom O’Hern’s artwork adorns whole pages, and though his huge black-and-white illustrations of skulls and decomposition are repetitive and predictable, his double-paged industrial ‘Behemoth’ demonstrates his flair.

A polyphony of voices in Antipodes offers readers a textured view of literature from Australia and New Zealand. Contributors to this biannual journal are Australianists from all over the world. This globalisation is perhaps best evidenced by the inclusion of critics from Portugal, Slovenia, Lebanon, and Austria, writing incisively about Gail Jones, Indigenous poetry, Australian Lebanese writers, and German translations of Aboriginal literature. Stephen Mansfield’s melismatic double feature on fathers and masculinity in John Hughes’s The Idea of Home (2004) is a highlight, but his interview with Hughes suffers from being conducted via email, while Jean-François Vernay’s interview with Sallie Muirden is a fascinating and unconstrained discussion of writing. Mark Larrimore’s essay on teaching ‘Aboriginal Australian Religion in an American Liberal Arts College’ is another example of the way Antipodes offers more than standard critiques on literature.

The critical essays collected in this current issue of Australia’s oldest literary journal make for frustrating reading. The theme is true crime, with a focus on the relationship between the sensational and the literary. Topics range from Underbelly Razor to the Jerilderie Letter to Schapelle Corby’s autobiography. Fascinating material, no doubt, but most of the contributions fail to engage and feel more like mutilated book chapters or hurriedly swept-together research notes, characterised by erratic analyses and flabby prose.

‘Tell me about it: you can trust me. I’m a writer.’ This ‘cautionary joke’ – one of few in this sober volume – cited in an essay by Frank Moorhouse, could be an epigraph for the latest Westerly. Editors Bird and Hughes-d’Aeth asked a selection of writers to share their thoughts on the ethics of writing. The ensuing essays include depictions of the past and of family in non-fiction, and play off each other interestingly. Kim Scott, Tiffany Shellam, and Clint Bracknell reflect on the Indigenous experience of colonisation. Scott offers a letter of sorts to an unnamed prison inmate, the result characteristically self-reflexive. Shellam delves into the archives to deconstruct the ‘friendly frontier’ trope, and Blaze Kwaymullina, in a metaphorically laboured appropriation of an appropriation, builds poems from the rearranged words of colonial archival documents.

Mark Latham rose to the leadership of the Labor Party unexpectedly, lost the 2004 federal election, retired to sulk from the sidelines, and has done so ever since. Whether he or Graham Richardson has done more damage to the party that nurtured them is a question I leave to the blogosphere. Before Latham became leader in 2003, he published considerably more about his vision for Labor than most parliamentarians have done, though none of his publications was as readable as his post-retirement diaries (2005), in which he displayed a lack of judgement and such scant goodwill to his colleagues that it leaves one astounded that they ever elected him leader. (When Latham ran against Kim Beazley for the leadership, two of the wiser members of caucus, Carmen Lawrence and Lindsay Tanner, counselled me against becoming too enthusiastic. They were clearly correct.)

The latest Sleepers Almanac opens with a surreal encounter between a suave cane toad, presented as an amphibian Jiminy Cricket, and the guilt-wracked mother of a drug addict (‘Happy Monday’), and ends with the elaborate imaginings of a woman trying to distract herself from the reason why she is sitting in a hospital waiting room (‘How to Talk to a Fire Extinguisher’). Other themes echoing through the anthology include infidelity, sibling rivalry, mental illness, bullying, child abuse, ageing, death, and the complex nature of love. So far, so grim. Fortunately, there is a playful warmth to the Almanac that belies the gravity of its subject matter without lessening its impact.

Australian Poetry Journal, the flagship publication of Australian Poetry, contains a veritable who’s who of Australian poets. However, this doesn’t mean that the journal is part of the poetry gangland to which some other contemporary Australian journals belong. This is a testament to editor, Bronwyn Lea, who must disappoint many poets – possibly even poet friends or acquaintances – in order to maintain the journal’s impressively high standard. While there are a bevy of famous names on the contents page, Australian Poetry Journal only publishes the best work from these poets and scholars. But it is not just a journal for established poets and poems; emerging poets Davina Allison and Carmen Leigh Keates effloresce in this vaunted company.|

This year’s annual fiction edition of Griffith Review – a collection of six stories chosen by competition – is dedicated to reviving the novella. In the golden age of print, the novella was mostly considered a literary misfit, too long for magazines, too short to publish profitably in a single book. It is a fair assumption that with new infrastructure provided by digital technology the novella might at last reach its market. Some hypothesise that it might even become popular; a story that can be read in one sitting might stand a chance of squeezing into the daily gavage of online ‘content’. True to these ideas, each piece published in Griffith Review 38: The Novella Project is available for individual digital purchase.