Noel Rowe

This volume of Southerly, combining the first two issues for 2007, is a celebration of Elizabeth Webby’s contribution to Australian literature. Noel Rowe and Bernadette Brennan, the editors principally responsible for this issue, describe it as ‘a tribute to a brilliant career’. There are contributions from academic colleagues, generations of poets and writers of short fiction, and a number of ex-students, many of whom ‘have gone on to distinguished academic careers’.

One of the best essays in the excellent spring issue of Griffith Review: The Next Big Thing, is a sustained attack by Griffith University academic Mark Bahnisch on the lazy clichés of ‘generation-journalism’. In an issue devoted to an examination of generational similarities and conflicts, Bahnisch calmly reminds us that not everyone living in the 1960s was a hell-raising radical, just as not all young people today fit the conservative–materialist stereotype the media is so fond of.

All regions being regions of the mind, ‘Asia’ has had an especially unsettled and unsettling place in Australian thought. Australia has, in part, defined its own ‘occidental’ status with almost hysterical reference to its many ‘oriental’ neighbours. The putative border crisis of recent times, for instance, involved representing (mostly Middle Eastern and Asian) refugees as cashed-up ‘queue jumpers’ and potential terrorists who were ready to swamp our shores.

Asian ‘hordes’ have long been spectres haunting the Australian imagination. We see them in Windchimes, a marvellous anthology of ‘Asia in Australian Poetry’. But all of the usual suspects are present here, too: Asia as feminine and erotic; as terminally superstitious or spiritually enlightened; as a realm of pure aestheticism; as timeless or primitive; and as a region of war and warriors. All of these tropes, like the idea of ‘Asia’ itself (a region that supposedly ranges from China to Turkey), are as factitious as the notion that Asia is even a distinct continent. So far, so Edward Said, whose Orientalism (1978) made such observations postcolonial clichés. But if we consider the poetry of Australia as it reflects upon the idea of Asia, then we find an exciting literature that both maps and exceeds such tropes.